hway, and temporary housing and tents.
After several cloudy days, Saturday, July 5th, turned out to be a sunny day in Chengdu.
We headed out for a field trip to Ziping dam near Dujiangyan and to Yingxiu, near the southern epicenter.
The visit to the dam was special since it is not generally open to the public. Our hosts from Sichuan Univ obtained special permissions for us.
About 45mts outside of Chengdu, we started seeing visible damage to structures as we were driving down the hig
Dujiangyan is a typical, crowded town. We saw extensive damage (see the first photo) and large temporary housing complexes everywhere.

Ziping dam is relatively new (~7 years) and seems to have withstood about twice the forces that it was designed for (see ...

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I am in Chengdu, China this week with a small team of colleagues from UC, visiting folks at Sichuan University, to discuss how we can help in the aftermath of the recent earthquake. The visit here has been organized by Prof. Gretchen Kalonji, Director of International Strategy Development, UCOP.

I gave a presentation on July 2nd, emphasizing our work with American Red Cross during Hurricane Katrina and highlighting opportunities for creation of a post-earthquake information management system. The work we have done in projects like GEON and NEES is very relevant and can be directly leveraged here.
After the talk, I met with a group at Sichuan University who are responsible for collecting and maintaining ...

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