Specialists to help develop community-wide resilience benchmarks

Washington, D.C. — A renowned group of subject matter experts have been selected to assist the International Code Council and the Alliance for National & Community Resilience (ANCR) in development of the U.S.’s first whole-community resilience benchmarks related to buildings.

The Resilient Buildings Committee consists of architects, code officials, government experts and other industry professionals from the New York City Department of Buildings, Dow Chemical Company, National Institute of Building Sciences and more. The full roster of subject matter experts serving the committee is available at https://www.iccsafe.org/wp-content/uploads/ANCR-Buildings-Committee_subject-matter-experts.pdf. These specialists will determine the criteria to evaluate a community’s capacity, risk awareness, competence and resources to respond to disasters or other events that affect the accessibility, quality or availability of homes, schools, stores and other buildings.

The American Institute of Architects pledged $500 and the American Wood Council donated $5,000 to ANCR. They join the Dow Chemical Company, Portland Cement Association, Simpson Strong-Tie, Target Corporation and others as ANCR sponsors. These organizations are supporting ANCR’s groundbreaking initiatives to help communities across the U.S. prepare for fires, floods, economic disruptions and other disasters.

“We are excited to have a diverse group of experts participating in the creation of the ANCR benchmark system. Once complete, this system will provide communities a transparent, practical and commonsense self-assessment to quickly and easily gauge their cross-sector resilience efforts. The devastating storms and fires in California, Florida, Puerto Rico, Texas and the U.S. Virgin Islands over the past year illustrate the importance of this groundbreaking program,” said ANCR’s Chairman Maj. General Warren C. Edwards USA (Ret.).

Openings on the water and energy infrastructure committees and sponsorship opportunities are still available. Contact ResilientAlliance@gmail.com for more information.