As Chile continues to face an extended period of severe weather, with persistent rainfall, river overflows, slope instabilities, erosion, infrastructure disruptions, and widespread impacts across multiple regions, an important question emerges:
Are we adequately assessing infrastructure resilience through a multi-hazard lens?
A recent opinion piece published in La Tercera by Jorge Tobar, President of AICE (the Association of Civil Structural Engineers of Chile), reflects discussions that have emerged within the AICE Board on the need to broaden our traditional understanding of structural safety. For decades, Chile has rightfully earned international recognition for its leadership in earthquake engineering. However, recent events remind us that infrastructure performance depends on much more than seismic resistance.
The current weather emergency is demonstrating how multiple hazards can interact simultaneously or sequentially. Intense precipitation may lead to soil saturation, erosion, loss of support conditions, flooding, debris flows, slope failures, and disruptions of critical infrastructure networks. In many cases, the greatest risks emerge not from a single event, but from the interaction between several hazards acting on the same system. This concept is at the core of the multi-hazard approach discussed in contemporary disaster risk research.
Traditional engineering assessments often evaluate hazards independently: earthquakes, floods, landslides, wind loads, coastal processes, or geotechnical failures. While this approach has generated significant advances, growing evidence suggests that risk is frequently underestimated when the relationships between hazards are overlooked. Multi-hazard studies emphasize that hazards may occur in parallel, trigger one another, or create cascading effects that amplify overall consequences.
For engineers, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity.
The challenge is technical: developing methodologies capable of understanding how different hazards interact across space and time and how these interactions influence the performance of structures, infrastructure corridors, utilities, and communities. Current research highlights the importance of moving beyond isolated analyses toward integrated risk assessment frameworks capable of capturing these complex interdependencies.
The opportunity lies in strengthening collaboration across disciplines. Structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, hydrology, hydraulics, climate science, asset management, emergency management, and territorial planning all contribute critical perspectives. Resilience cannot be delivered by a single discipline acting in isolation; it requires systems thinking and integrated decision-making.
The ongoing storms in Chile also provide a valuable reminder that resilience should not be measured solely by whether an asset survives an event. True resilience is reflected in the ability of infrastructure systems to maintain functionality, connectivity, serviceability, and recoverability during and after extreme conditions.
As engineers, it is our responsibility to continuously learn from real-world events. Every flood, landslide, river scour event, foundation issue, wind-related failure, or infrastructure disruption provides insights that can help improve future design practices, standards, risk models, and asset management strategies.
Chile's long-standing seismic engineering expertise provides a strong foundation. The next step may be to build upon that legacy by embracing a broader multi-hazard perspective—one that recognizes the interconnected nature of today's risks and prepares our infrastructure not only to withstand individual hazards, but to perform under increasingly complex and uncertain conditions.
The storm is still unfolding. The lessons are still being learned. But one conclusion is already becoming clear:
The future of resilient infrastructure will depend not only on how well we understand individual hazards, but on how effectively we understand their interactions.
As engineers, our responsibility is not only to respond to today's challenges, but also to help shape the frameworks, standards, and practices that will strengthen resilience for generations to come.
See related interview in Negocio & Construcción (page 77).
FYU Engineering
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