Some types of scientific research are driven by opportunity, which frequently means waiting for the next shoe to drop. For Laura Steinberg, that shoe usually is large and destructive.
Laura Steinberg, Department of Environmental and Civil Engineering
Steinberg is a nationally known expert on how natural and technological disasters are magnified in urban areas. From earthquakes to hurricanes to plant explosions, Steinberg aims her research at mitigating the ripple effects from the next “big one.”
In one of life’s ironies, Steinberg arrived at SMU because of the indiscriminate hand of Hurricane Katrina, which chased her from her New Orleans home in advance of the catastrophic flooding and interrupted her teaching at Tulane University, just as the 2005 fall semester was getting under way. She took no comfort in being right: She had been warning people for years that the right storm would create huge environmental problems for residents along the Gulf Coast, thanks to the regional proliferation of industrial plants and petrochemical refineries. The black sheen of spilled oil floating on the New Orleans floodwaters remains an iconic image from post-storm days.
Steinberg was cast adrift in every sense: Tulane closed its doors for four months after the flooding, but her expertise was in high demand. She moved briefly to Washington, D.C., to serve a fellowship at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, focusing on critical infrastructure research as well as risk assessment and modeling strategy for natural disasters. She also took an appointment as a visiting scientist at George Washington University’s Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management, where she continued to work on Hurricane Katrina response issues, including U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ preparations for the 2006 hurricane season.
Professor of Environmental and Civil Engineering Bijan Mohraz, former chair of the SMU department, invited Steinberg to join the School of Engineering faculty starting in fall 2006, and she became chair in spring 2007. Steinberg barely paused for breath in her scholarly activities and has broadened her Katrina-related research, bringing
it into a project for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“We’re evaluating a multimillion-dollar computer model that the Los Alamos National Laboratory has built to predict the cascading effects of a large natural disaster or major terrorist attack,” Steinberg says. The model predicts how change or damage to one level of infrastructure would impact others like police and fire departments, health services, transportation, telecommunications and utilities.
“The problem is, are all these big projections right? We have to have a big disaster to provide real world data,” she says. “So we’re running the model simulating part of Hurricane Katrina’s effects on the infrastructure of Baton Rouge, which actually turned out to be a place where almost 200,000 people fled.” If the model is good at “predicting” the effects on Baton Rouge, it will be reasonable to assume its ability to accurately predict the effect of other large events.
“The School of Engineering is committed to sustainability as a way of life, as evidenced by this building [Embrey Engineering Building] and the programs within it. The growing Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex cries out for attention to issues of renewable resources and the promotion of a healthy and clean environment.”
– Laura Steinberg
Another Katrina-based project she is leading is an effort to understand the effect of Katrina on Gulf Coast industrial facilities, pipelines and terminals in the path of the hurricane. “We plan to conduct interviews with the facility plant managers where there was significant damage to understand better the nature of the damage, the causes and effects of it, and to brainstorm mitigating measures to prevent them from happening in the future.”
Steinberg received Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in environmental
engineering from Duke University. Her personal experience with disaster started with her fieldwork in Turkey after a 1999 earthquake killed 17,000 people and injured 43,000. The quake was concentrated in an area dominated by oil refineries, several automotive plants and a military arsenal. That experience, coupled with her more recent work after Katrina, has given Steinberg a heightened sense of responsibility. “It makes the issues so much more human,” she says. “And not just because of my experience in New Orleans – but because of the people I know, the faces I’ve seen.”
Steinberg’s vision for herself and the Department of Environmental and Civil Engineering is broader than even Katrina’s footprint. Looking around her office in the environmentally friendly Embrey Engineering Building, she discusses a mental “to do” list.
“I see myself working in the sustainability area, both developing curriculum and programs, merging that with disaster resilience and focusing a large part of my efforts on water supply issues relevant to the entire Southwest and North Texas,” she says. “The School of Engineering is committed to sustainability as a way of life, as evidenced by this building and the programs within it. The growing Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex cries out for attention to issues of renewable resources and the promotion of a healthy and clean environment.”
She also helped to develop a plan to prevent personal disaster among students by serving on SMU’s Task Force on Substance Abuse Prevention, which delivered its numerous recommendations in February.
Although she likes her new life in Dallas, Steinberg misses the Big Easy. She returns every six weeks or so to keep up with friends and past projects. She reports that the areas of New Orleans that are thriving “are doing well and full of beautiful architecture and landscaping, and yet a good portion of the city (geographically and socioeconomically) is poor and living in substandard housing, or even homeless. Now that much of the city lies unreconstructed, the divide is even more obvious and exaggerated than previously.”
– Kim Cobb