Meeting with DHV Asia

Thursday, July 15th, 2010: DHV Asia

Bram, Paul, and Khanif

A Dutch firm, DHV has branches of their structural engineering firm around the world including one in Jakarta. We met with them after hearing that they had designed vertical evacuation structures for Aceh a couple years after the tsunami there. Originally, they had funding to do the complete design with a strong implication that they would be built. Unfortunately, the funding was cut and directed elsewhere, so these four versions of evacuation structures that they designed are just sitting in their office, and they want them to be used somehow.

We presented our project including all evacuation structures options (TEREP, retrofit, new design, overpass) that we have come up with so far, and discussed the design process that we went through during the class (thanks teams!) compared to that which DHV used. Certain things like the design flow depth (they used the height of the tsunami in 2004, we used FEMA and the Last Mile inundation map for Padang) and the succession of loading for the earthquake and tsunami. It was good to talk about engineering again after a long month since school dismissed for the summer.

The engineers at DHV said they would like to publish something with us so their designs could be available for other people around Indonesia to use as a reference for tsunami resistant design. We will be speaking with them more in the future about this prospect, and until then we have their design drawings to compare to ours and that of the government for new evacuation structures that are being constructed in Padang. The DHV designs are two and three story buildings that serve a meantime function as a market or multi-purpose building that would be worked into the everyday lives of the population.

They are a very nice group of engineers and we look forward to discussing more with them in the future.