Work on the nation's first public repository for data on disaster and failure events is under way. The National Institute of Standards and Technology expects to launch a pilot website for a broad disaster database early next year. Events stemming from earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, windstorms, community-scale fires, structural fires, storm surges, floods and tsunamis are included in the repository.
“The effort will support development of standards and technologies for effective collection of data on disasters and failures,” in addition to providing public access to data, said Eric Letvin, director of NIST's disaster and failure studies program, at the 2011 Structures Congress, April 14-16 in Las Vegas.