After the deadly Feb. 6 earthquakes, Cal Poly civil engineering professor Rob Moss visited Turkey “to collect data and find answers” with colleagues from a nearby Middle Eastern Technical University.
Now, Moss will be sharing his findings at an event on Cal Poly’s campus.
Moss will be speaking about Turkey’s earthquakes and the aftermath in the Advanced Technologies Building (No. 7) from 6:40 to 8 p.m.
On Feb. 6, earthquakes of 7.5 and 7.8 magnitudes shook Turkey, killing more than 47,000 people and destroying homes and buildings. This devastating event presents the opportunity to further study these kinds of natural disasters.
“We drove over 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles), observed ground and structural damage, and talked to locals through a translator so we could put our arms around the problem,” Moss said in a College of Engineering newsletter.
“The Turkish people are amazingly resilient. We saw people who had lost their entire family helping other families rebuild,” Moss said.
Moss has studied earthquakes for more than 20 years. He is a member of the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association team, an organization of geotechnical researchers which deployed him to investigate the destruction of the quakes in Turkey.