The EERI Oral

History Series

This is the twenty-fourth volume in the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s

Connections: The EERI Oral History Series. EERI began this series to preserve the recollections

of some of those who have had pioneering careers in the field of earthquake engineering.

Significant, even revolutionary, changes have occurred in earthquake engineering since

individuals first began thinking in modern, scientific ways about how to protect construction

and society from earthquakes. The Connections series helps document this important history.

Connections is a vehicle for transmitting the fascinating accounts of individuals who were

present at the beginning of important developments in the field, documenting sometimes

little-known facts about this history, and recording their impressions, judgments, and experiences from a personal standpoint. These reminiscences are themselves a vital contribution to our understanding of where our current state of knowledge came from and how the

overall goal of reducing earthquake losses has been advanced. The Earthquake Engineering

Research Institute, incorporated in 1948 as a nonprofit organization to provide an institutional base for the then-young field of earthquake engineering, is proud to help tell the story

of the development of earthquake engineering through the Connections series. EERI has

grown from a few dozen individuals in a field that lacked any significant research funding to

an organization with nearly 3,000 members. It is still devoted to its original goal of investigating the effects of destructive earthquakes and publishing the results through its reconnaissance report series. EERI brings researchers and practitioners together to exchange

information at its annual meetings and, via a now-extensive calendar of conferences and

workshops, provides a forum through which individuals and organizations of various disciplinary backgrounds can work together for increased seismic safety.

The EERI oral history program was initiated by Stanley Scott （1921-2002）. The first nine

volumes were published during his lifetime, and manuscripts and interview transcripts

he left to EERI are resulting in the publication of other volumes for which he is being

posthumously credited. In addition, the Oral History Committee is including further 

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interviewees within the program’s scope, following the Committee’s charge to include

subjects who: 1） have made an outstanding career-long contribution to earthquake

engineering; 2） have valuable first-person accounts to offer concerning the history of

earthquake engineering; and 3） whose backgrounds, considering the series as a whole,

appropriately span the various disciplines that are included in the field of earthquake

engineering. Scott’s work, which he began in 1984, summed to hundreds of hours of taped

interview sessions and thousands of pages of transcripts. Were it not for him, valuable facts

and recollections would already have been lost.

Scott was a research political scientist at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the

University of California, Berkeley. He was active in developing seismic safety policy for

many years and was a member of the California Seismic Safety Commission from 1975 to

1993. For his contribution to the field, he received the Alfred E. Alquist Award from the

Earthquake Safety Foundation in 1990.

Scott received assistance in formulating his oral history plans from Willa Baum, Director of

the University of California, Berkeley Regional Oral History Office, a division of the Bancroft Library. An unfunded interview project on earthquake engineering and seismic safety

was approved, and Scott was encouraged to proceed. Following his retirement from the

university in 1989, Scott continued the oral history project. For a time, some expenses were

paid by a small grant from the National Science Foundation, but Scott did most of the work

pro bono. This work included not only the obvious effort of preparing for and conducting

the interviews themselves, but also the more time-consuming tasks of reviewing transcripts

and editing the manuscripts to flow smoothly.

The Connections oral history series presents a selection of senior individuals in earthquake

engineering who were present at the beginning of the modern era of that field. The term

“earthquake engineering” as used here has the same meaning as in the name of EERI—the

broadly construed set of disciplines, including geosciences and social sciences as well as

engineering itself, that together form a related body of knowledge and collection of individuals that revolve around the subject of earthquakes. The events described in these oral

histories span many kinds of activities: research, design projects, public policy and broad

social aspects, and education, as well as interesting personal aspects of the subjects’ lives.