About the Topic

The response of structures to accidental fire events is a crucial component of the safety and resilience of the built environment. While structural engineers explicitly consider gravity, wind, and earthquake- induced forces in their design, they often rely on prescriptive rules for mitigating fire hazard. However, developing an understanding of the anticipated behavior of structures in fire provides benefits as it allows engineers to assess risk, safely innovate, and quantify performance of candidate designs to meet resilience and sustainability goals. Engineers must have access to the appropriate models and analyses tools to enable these assessments. This presentation will discuss available methods for characterizing fire exposures, material response, and structural behavior in the fire situation, and discuss their application as part of a performance-based structural fire design approach. The presentation will also highlight through practical examples how assessing explicitly the performance of structures in fire can deliver benefits in terms of cost, safety, architectural heritage, sustainability, and resilience.

About the Speaker

Thomas Gernay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded and leads the Multi-Hazard Resilient Structures group. His areas of research are in structural fire engineering, computational mechanics, risk and resilience, and performance-based design. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the co- author of SAFIR®, the finite element software to model the behavior of structures subjected to fire. His contributions have notably been recognized by an NSF CAREER award, the AISC Terry Peshia Early Career Faculty Award, the NFPA Foundation Medal, and the IAFSS Magnusson Early Career Award. He serves as an Associate Editor for both the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering and for Springer’s Fire Technology, and is Co-Chair of the ASCE SEI Fire Protection Committee. He holds a Ph.D. in structural engineering from University of Liege and was a Fulbright postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.

About the Topic

Completed in 1985, Mosul Dam was built in a less than desirable geologic setting – underlain by hundreds of meters of formations that include soluble materials such as gypsum, anhydrite and limestone. Due to its challenging foundation conditions, has been called “the most dangerous dam in the world” and requires regular and continual grouting to maintain a grout curtain cutoff beneath the dam. Military activities in 2014 resulted in the capture, and recovery of the dam from Isis militants which interrupted grouting and damaged equipment - further increasing the risk of potential failure.  The dam provides flood control on the Tigris River, as well as hydro power and water supply to a significant portion of Iraq. It is the biggest dam in Iraq with a capacity of 12 billion cubic meters (10 million acre-feet); however, its storage also represents a significant risk.  Studies have concluded that catastrophic failure of the dam would impact millions of people downstream including the cities of Mosul and Baghdad.

Mr. Sawitzki, M.A.Sc, PE, AECOM will speak to us about his team’s support to the USACE who were tasked with supporting the Iraqi Government (Ministry of Water Resources) in their efforts to stabilize the Mosul Dam foundation and rehabilitate the dam.  With a team of up to 40 AECOM staff at the project site for more than two years, this project has succeeded in the face of many unique challenges.  Primary goals included foundation grouting to stabilize the soluble underlying geology, repair of key outlet works, improvements in dam safety and general rehabilitation of Mosul Dam.  This presentation will focus on the challenges and activities accomplished.

About the Speaker

Mr. Sawitzki has been a consulting engineer for his entire career specializing in Civil-Geotechnical engineering.  He is a vice President and Principal Geotechnical Dam Safety Engineer at AECOM with over 30 years of engineering consulting experience.  In his current role as US East Federal Defense Business Line Leader, he leads Architectural-Engineering pursuits with the major DOD agencies including the major Civil Works programs which result.

With a BS degree in Geological Engineering from Princeton University in 1988 and a MaSC degree in civil/geotechnical engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada in 1989, he has been professionally licensed as a Professional Engineer (PE) since 1993.  Mr. Sawitzki has performed the role of Program Manager or Deputy Program Manager on multiple USACE IDIQ style contracts with an aggregate value of engineering services exceeding $300M and understands both the client and the process of managing work under this type of contract – managing individual projects up to $100M. With a technical background in the conceptual design, layout, engineering analysis, permitting, detailed design, construction quality control testing, risk assessment, probable failure mode analysis and dam removal aspects of more than 50 dams and more than 20 major levee systems.  Major Civil Works programs also include the Norfolk CSRM program – Resilient Norfolk.  Mr. Sawitzki has supported FEMA's National Dam Safety Program in the development of the EMI Course 0291, entitled "Community Dam Safety, Preparedness and Mitigation" as well as led the development and updating of the Training Aids for Dam Safety (TADS) manuals.