The NSF NHERI Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network produces rapid, publicly archived engineering assessments of how buildings and infrastructure perform during natural hazard events, including earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis. The goal of this research is to capture perishable damage data quickly after a disaster and translate it into reliable evidence that informs research, design codes and practice, and recovery decisions. These reports are published on DesignSafe, the NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure for natural hazards research.
Many StEER reports begin with virtual reconnaissance, in which a team assembles and analyzes images and videos shared by news outlets, social media users, and field contributors in the days after an event. Before this media can serve as engineering evidence, its origin, location, date, and proper attribution must be verified. Techniques include source-chain tracing, reverse image search, EXIF metadata analysis, geolocation using maps and satellite imagery, and cross-source corroboration. Python automation scripts are used to triage large media repositories and flag gaps or inconsistencies.
Students join a distributed virtual assessment team of faculty, researchers, and international partners. After initial training, they verify the provenance of media assigned to them, document their findings to the network's citation and data-integrity standards, and flag unresolved items for the report authors. Students work independently on their assignments, meet regularly with the team, and see their work contribute directly to published reconnaissance reports.
Few research experiences are as fast-moving or as consequential as disaster reconnaissance. When a major earthquake, hurricane, tornado, or tsunami strikes, the StEER Network mobilizes within days, and students work alongside faculty, researchers, and international partners as an event’s impacts are still being understood. Each event brings new places, building types, and questions, so no two projects are the same.
This work matters because it yields systematic evidence on how the built environment performs under natural hazards. Students learn how the engineering community “learns from disasters,” and they contribute to research that has the potential to change policies and practices and reduce the toll of disasters on communities worldwide. It is very rare for students to have access to data on how real-world, as-built structures perform. Most engineering coursework relies on idealized models, while this work shows what actually happens when those structures are tested by nature.
StEER is part of a broader research portfolio at Notre Dame on hazard resilience. Related efforts include hurricane risk simulation through the NSF NHERI SimCenter, remote sensing and AI-based frameworks for post-disaster damage assessment, and interdisciplinary research on how to translate resilience measures into policy and stakeholder action. Students who join this group gain exposure to that wider ecosystem and the many career paths it opens across engineering, data science, public policy, and global development.
