Mon. 1:30 to 3:00 p.m. MDT

When Salt Lake City was rocked by a 5.7 Magnitude earthquake earlier this year—the first major earthquake in the Salt Lake Valley since the city was founded—it wasn’t entirely caught off guard. The Utah Division of Emergency Management and the Federal Emergency Management agency has been working to mitigate the area’s risk, especially that from the more than 140,000 brittle unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings in the region. This session will describe the response to the 2020 earthquake, contextualize the effects of ongoing earthquake mitigation activities and share best practices from established mitigation programs, such as the popular Fix the Bricks residential retrofitting initiative, and the development of the Wasatch Front URM Risk Reduction Strategy. The panel will also discuss coordination successes, such as leveraging the 2021 Great Salt Shake earthquake exercise to spur mitigation action.