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What does it mean to do \u201creconnaissance\u201d after a natural disaster? To find out, host Dan Zehner catches up with Ellen Rathje, an earthquake engineer at the University of Texas, Austin. Among her many interests, Rathje is a founding member and co-chair of the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association (http://www.geerassociation.org). Rathje explains that although she originally wanted to be a journalist, she really liked math in high school. When she learned that civil engineers worked on big projects like bridges, she was hooked. During her undergraduate years at Cornell, the Loma Prieta earthquake occurred. She was fascinated. She decided she wanted to be the kind of engineer who designed structures that could withstand earthquakes. In 1999, as a new faculty member at UT, she was selected for a reconnaissance team investigating Turkey\u2019s Kocaeli earthquake, a 7.6 magnitude temblor that killed 17,000 people. Rathje describes the experience and the damage she encountered, including liquefaction. On this trip, she says she came to understand the importance of collecting post-disaster information. She says natural disasters are \u201cNature\u2019s large-scale tests.\u201d With reconnaissance, we can begin to understand the results of the tests. Rathje describes GEER, an NSF-funded association that organizes recon teams. With modest federal funding, GEER volunteers document natural disaster events large and small. To date, more than 50 events have been documented, and all the reports are available on the GEER website (http://www.geerassociation.org/reconnaissance-reports/map-view). Rathje says technology is enabling better and better observations. She describes hunting for paper maps and using a camera with 3.5\u201d floppy discs in 1999. Hand-held GPS devices helped provide latitude and longitude for observations and photos. Later came geotagging. GEER teams were among the first to geotag photos. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, a 7.0 magnitude quake that killed hundreds of thousands of people, technology was much more advanced. Rathje describes using Google Earth and digital camera synching. New recon tools included high-resolution aerial photography. Teams used sensors and weights for measuring shear wave velocity. In 2017, Rathje says, technology such as LIDAR and drones allow for fast, relatively inexpensive 3D models of damage, models which can be used in perpetuity for research. In less than 20 years, reconnaissance efforts have changed dramatically. Now, it is possible to get high quality datasets and make them publically available. Rathjes, the PI for NHERI\u2019s cyberinfrastructure, DesignSafe, says the goal is to provide a mechanism for researchers to publish and organize their datasets for the whole research community. She discusses DesignSafe\u2019s online data repository and the ability for researchers to publish data, much like a research paper, as a scholarly contribution. DesignSafe researchers access and analyze data in the cloud. In the Discovery workspace, tools include Jupyter and Matlab for lab experiments and simulations. Rathje describes DesignSafe\u2019s Reconnaissance Portal with provides access to hazard event datasets. Currently, NHERI-affiliated recon teams are providing data from recent natural disasters in Mexico, Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Rathje says the most difficult disaster she experienced was the 2010 Haiti earthquake, where so many people lost their lives. Her team brought their own food, stayed in tents, and worked under the protection of armed guards. After the recon mission was over, her team worked with the United Nations to educate local Haitians about geotechnics, which would help them in rebuilding efforts.