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Since its founding in 2018, the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network has worked to deepen the capacity of the Natural Hazards Engineering (NHE) community for coordinated and standardized assessments of the performance of the built environment following natural hazard events. This paper positions StEER within the field of engineering reconnaissance and the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI), outlining its organizational model for coordinated community-led responses to wind, seismic, and coastal hazard events. The paper’s examination of StEER’s event response workflow, engaging a range of hardware and delivering a suite of products, demonstrates StEER’s contributions in the areas of: workflow and data standardization, data reliability to enable field-observation-driven research & development, efficiency in data collection and dissemination to speed knowledge sharing, near-real- time open data access for enhanced coordination and transparency, and flexibility in collaboration modes to reduce the “overhead” associated with reconnaissance and foster broad NHE community engagement in event responses as part of field and virtual assessment structural teams (FAST/VAST). StEER’s creation of efficient systems to deliver well-documented, reliable data suitable for diverse re-uses as well as rapidly disseminated synopses of the impact of natural hazard events on the built environment provide a distinctive complement to existing post-event reconnaissance initiatives. The implementation of these policies, protocols and workflows is then demonstrated with case studies from five events illustrating StEER’s different field response strategies: the Nashville, Tennessee Tornadoes (2020) – a Hazard Gradient Survey; the Palu Earthquake and Tsunami in Indonesia (2018) – a Representative Performance Study; the Puerto Rico Earthquakes (2019/2020) – using Targeted Case Studies; Hurricane Laura (2020) – leveraging Rapid Surveys to enable virtual assessments; and Hurricane Dorian (2019) in the Bahamas – a Phased Multi-Hazard Investigation. The use of these strategies has enabled StEER to respond to 36 natural hazard events, involving over 150 different individuals to produce 45 published reports/briefings, over 5000 publicly available app-based structural assessments, and over 1600 km (1000 mi) of street-level panoramic imagery in its first 2years of operation.
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This content will become publicly available on May 14, 2026
A Unified Framework for Post-disaster Hazard and Structural Assessment Data Collection Across Hazards and Infrastructure Typologies
Post-disaster field observations of the built environment are critical for advancing fundamental research that links hazard data to structural performance, cascading community impacts, and the development of effective mitigation strategies. Yet, data collection remain fragmented across hazard types and infrastructure systems due to varying objectives, methodologies, protocols, and standards among investigators and organizations. To address this, a Unified Assessment Framework has been developed for standardized post-disaster hazard and structural assessment data and metadata collection across multiple natural hazards (earthquake, windstorm, coastal events) and infrastructure typologies. The framework encompasses a tiered performance assessment structure with increasing rigor and fidelity levels: Basic Assessment (BA), Load Path Assessment (LPA), and Detailed Component Assessment (DCA). The framework has been implemented as an open-access mobile application, the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network’s StEER Unified App, hosted on Fulcrum data collection platform . Along with unification of data fields, preliminary mapping rules were developed to map out existing hazard-specific damage rating scales (e.g., wind, surge/flooding, rainwater ingress) to the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98) compatible unified damage scale, enabling consolidation of global damage ratings into a common data field, facilitating the unification of multiple hazards within a single app. In the mapping of damage ratings, overarching level definitions were retained (e.g., slight, moderate, severe damage) while customizing the specific descriptors to reflect hazard-specific damage mechanisms. Two use cases are presented to demonstrate the application of this framework through the StEER Unified App: a supervised pilot after the 2022 Hurricane Ian, Florida and an unsupervised deployment for the 2023 Turkey earthquake sequence. These deployments illustrate the framework’s flexibility and scalability, validate the feasibility of standardized assessments, and offer insights into how data quality is influenced by assessor pre-deployment training and assessment tier—particularly for complex tasks such as load path evaluation. This work advances the field by providing a scalable, standardized, and hazard-agnostic approach to structural field reconnaissance. The open-access framework and app support real-time deployments and enable integration of legacy datasets into a unified platform—laying the foundation for longitudinal analyses, cross-hazard comparisons, and expanded data reuse in the Natural Hazards Engineering community.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2103550
- PAR ID:
- 10600619
- Publisher / Repository:
- frontiersin.org
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in built environment
- ISSN:
- 2297-3362
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- damage rating, earthquakes, hurricanes, reconnaissance, StEER, structural assessment, tsunamis, tornadoes
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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