It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The explosion occurred when a crane lifting a boiler collapsed into a large industrial furnace, causing a huge fire.
The blast happened at midday local time, when a crane lifting a replacement boiler collapsed and fell into a furnace used during the liquid steel casting process.
The fire at the HABAS plant in Aliaga, Izmir province, claimed at least 17 people's lives and also injured 13 people, two of them critically, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised address following a scheduled Cabinet meeting.
"The circumstances surrounding this tragic incident, which has deeply saddened our nation, including how and why it happened, whether there was any negligence and who bears responsibility, will be established," Erdogan said on television.
According to eye witnesses, the explosion "felt like an earthquake".
Izmir mayor Cemil Tugay said on X that rescue teams were "continuing their work to remove the collapsed platform" and that those affected were factory workers.
EU president Ursula van der Leyen has expressed her condolences
HABAS is a privately owned group and one of Turkey's top steel producers. The plant was established in 1987 and can produce 4.5 million tons of steel annually, according to the company’s website.
Workers' groups said there was a long record of safety issues at HABAS.
Major explosion at Turkish steelmaker Habas’ Aliaga plant kills at least six
The noise and smoke caused by the explosion at the plant were observed across Izmir. / social media footageFacebook
At least six workers were killed, with dozens more injured or trapped, following a major explosion on November 9 that took place around noon (local time) at steelmaker Habas’ plant in western Turkey, the Izmir governorate said in a press release.
The incident occurred at the industrial group’s primary manufacturing complex in the Bozkoy neighborhood on the Aliaga peninsula, an industrial heartland and key shipping hub located north of Izmir on the Aegean coast.
According to preliminary assessments released by the governorate, the blast was triggered during a liquid steel casting operation when an overhead crane failed and plummeted directly into an electric arc furnace.
Initial reports from regional officials confirmed three fatalities at the scene and 14 injuries with several victims transferred to nearby medical facilities in a critical condition. In a subsequent statement issued later in the afternoon, the governorate updated the death toll to six after one critically injured worker succumbed to injuries in hospital and search-and-rescue teams recovered two additional bodies from wreckage.
Emergency crews remain deployed at the site where search-and-rescue efforts continued to reach workers feared trapped beneath heavy industrial debris.
Habas, one of Turkey’s biggest steel producers, also operates extensive production facilities for industrial gases and heavy manufacturing. Its Aliaga complex serves as a crucial node in the country's metal export supply chain, producing long products and billets for international markets.
\
Sunday, November 08, 2026
University of Oregon geologist sheds light on earthquake hazard assessment
University of Oregon geologist Becky Dorsey’s latest research sheds light on the Siculo-Calabrian rift zone, a belt of faults spanning more than 100 miles in southern Italy. The new data could help improve earthquake hazard assessment in this seismically active region.
In 2025, a UO-led research team collected sand samples from marine terraces up to approximately 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) above sea level in southern Calabria. That bold experiment revealed evidence these step-like formations are rising five to 10 times faster than previously thought.
Until now, geologists have not sampled marine terraces at such high elevations for luminescence dating, because it was believed the terraces are about one million years old and therefore exceed the limits of this method. However, the team successfully applied that process to the samples, supporting Dorsey’s hypothesis that the high-elevation terraces are much younger than currently inferred by most geologists.
Her findings were published Nov. 6 in Communications Earth and Environment. Dorsey’s research unearths new clues to what’s happening with the Ionian slab, an oceanic segment of the African tectonic plate. The results challenge prevailing explanations for the rising marine terraces and make a strong case for an alternative cause: the Ionian slab is tearing directly beneath southern Calabria.
Studying the dynamics of slab detachment in Italy’s well documented subduction zone will help scientists understand seismic hazards in this and other active areas such as the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the Pacific Northwest.
Well that was a night. The glad spectacle of a newly sentient America tottering back to its capacious ideals was dubbed Orange Crush, Bluenami, a political earthquake, a wily tweak to Hegseth’s coveted public execution and “one of the great acts of defiance in American history.” It was both landslide too big to rig or stop and “extinction-level” rout. Above all, it was a thunderous rejection of fear, greed, lies, cruelty, war-mongering, authoritarianism. Tell your kids, urged Abdul El-Sayed, “The bad guys lost.”
Who knew, pundits marveled: Turns out if you keep lying, stealing, abusing children, terrorizing, kidnapping, assaulting neighbors, shooting people in the street, making it impossible to get food, gas, health care or education while gloating about it and lining your fat pockets, everyone hates you. So it was that a “Trump Reckoning” and GOP “Armageddon” beyond even their worst doomsday scenarios arrived wherein Democrats swept “nearly every race that matters” as Americans en masse embraced all the shithole, lunatic, transgender, anti-Semitic, dog-eating, Medicare-wanting Muslim Brotherhood communists they’d been so helpfully warned about, alas, in vain.
This, of course, despite MAGA’s best/worst efforts to re-draw districts, shutter polling places, strong-arm election officials, browbeat brown and black voters, pre-litigate election results they couldn’t buy, and launch 1,000 DOJ “polling monitors” into all 50 states in hopes of targeting vulnerable minority districts. And yet, noted Garrett Graff, nothing untoward happened. Instead, voters “gave America another chance.” Millions stood up, showed up, voted early, refused to bend the knee or be silenced. Graff said a friend wrote from deep-red Mississippi, where Democrat Scott Colom still had a stunning, razor-thin lead. “My flabbers are gasted,” she wrote. “Be on the lookout for pigs in the sky.”
“So much history was made last night,” Graff added, much of it shaped by both the 250 years and then Trump’s dark reign of white supremacist politics. The startling result: The most diverse set of newly elected lawmakers the country has ever seen, with one historian writing Dems are winning races “they haven’t won since they were the white supremacist party.” An Atlanta Journal-Constitution story begins, “In 1860, an enslaved man named Sheppard Peek was listed among the possessions of William Peek, a white man in Crawfordville”; Sheppard’s value was placed at $1,400. In Georgia on Tuesday, his great-great-granddaughter, Keisha Lance Bottoms, was elected the first Black female governor in the country.
Bottoms is just one of many historic firsts. Xavier Becerra, the son of Mexican immigrants, became California’s first elected Latino governor. Deb Haaland became New Mexico’s first Native governor. Wisconsin and Nevada elected their first Black governors. There are three other first women governors. New Hampshire’s Chris Pappas will become the first out gay man in the Senate. A trans woman won a House seat in...Alabama. Colorado elected its first Gen Z woman; she will be one of a record 100 women to serve simultaneously in the House. Democrats gained full control of a record six state governments, Southern voters swung 20 points to Dems, Jon Ossoff was easily re-elected on a platform, essentially, of “I don’t like Nazis.” Virginia ended Jim Crow after 124 years, and enshrined abortion in its constitution. Nancy LaCore, a former Navy admiral fired by Hegseth, flipped Nancy Mace’s seat in South Carolina. The GOP lost all four of its gerrymandered districts in Florida. Egyptian-born Adam Hamaway, 57, will be the first Muslim elected to the House from New Jersey. A Rutgers-educated doctor, he served 8 years as a combat surgeon in the US Army before starting private practice in Princeton; he also volunteered in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Jordan.
Beating back a grotesquely Islamophobic campaign, Michigan’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will become the first Muslim in the Senate.In his victory speech, he thanked “everyone who sent a dollar, made a call, posted a story and most importantly gave us your stake in democracy. You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates.” Summoning “all the kids who watched and the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked someone for their name or how they pray, let them (know) the bad guys lost...We deserve an America big enough for all our kids - let’s go build it.” He also cited the “delicious irony” that JD, whose “view of America is small, like him,” is constitutionally obligated to swear him in come January.
In another sweet spot and longtime pipe dream, Talarico took back Texas from the scandal-smeared Paxton in “not just a tsunami, but a bloodbath.” Adding to the schadenfreude was the upset win by Gina Hinojosa, the state’s first Latina governor-elect, over monstrous Greg Abbott. In a stunning twist, Dems also won every statewide office down to railroad commissioner, along with four Supreme Court seats; the wins prompted an explosion of noisy joy in Austin that “sounded like an Eastern European city that just overthrew a dictator.“ The cherry on top: Texas’ new Dem Attorney General, who campaigned on investigating Elon Musk after he moved his business there to escape California woke, can now prosecute him for state level crimes without any DOJ interference.
Musk, who spent half a billion dollars nationwide and lost every race he tried to buy, is among MAGA fat cats, tech bros and grifters who’ll likely be targeted by California’s (easily reelected) Robert Garcia, set to chair the House Oversight Committee. His blunt message: “Lawyer up.” Many others also feel “the only way we want Dems to reach across the aisle is with a subpoena.” With an “accountability bill” ready, Dean Blundell argues, “A LOT of people need to go to jail” - Hegseth, the Trump family crypto empire, the DOJ hacks who covered up Epstein crimes, the Rapist-In-Chief, the sadists of ICE once it’s been “torn down to the studs.” Scores of voters also demanded justice for their victims Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by putting “I Voted” stickers on their memorials: “They were on the ballot.”
Over at the presumably ketchup-encrusted White House, Trump remains in his own daft fantasy world, the “lamest of lame ducks.” He burbles he “looks forward to working with” the trans jihadists he says are destroying America, but he’ll veto everything. He’s awash in his “magnificent” ballroom. He insists if he was on the ballot “we’d have won IN A LANDSLIDE,” but of course he was and CNN‘s John King is happy to name all the places he told voters to pretend he was: “They did. They’d had enough.” Even his cultists - and ex-cultists - blame him: “The reason isn’t them, it’s you. You fucked us. We chose Hitler with Down Syndrome, and we lost.” Online, meanwhile, the White House posted a desperate “PSA: Trump Is Still Your President.” Like we could forget.
Still, the seismic shift tentatively feels like a new dawn, a path toward redemption, a sliver of hope, the long-ago thing with feathers we can barely remember. Candidates, volunteers, organizers, lawyers stepped up, and vast numbers of Americans showed up to support them. The mood was buoyant. Some said they wished Mitch McConnell was alive to see the Senate results. The Borowitz Report said Mike Johnson begged God to “rapture him up” immediately; tearfully, he said that as a loyal Republican he couldn’t bear to be in a “minority” because he hates ‘em all. Another report said a bitter Elon Musk put Ken Paxton on eBay; no buyers yet. Also, tragically, two sources say cracks and peeling have again emerged in the Reflecting Pool, but MAGA is on it. Said an Interior spokesperson, “The Reflecting Pool has never looked this beautiful, and it’s all thanks to President Donald J. Trump.”
Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman Win's Los Angeles Mayoral Race “Even though every city councilperson said they were standing with Karen Bass, not very many of the people they represent followed them to the polls,” said a labor leader who backed Raman.
Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman embraces her husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, and an unidentified friend at her election night party at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles on November 4, 2026. (Photo by Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
With Los Angeles Council member Nithya Raman, the first democratic socialist city policymaker, leading Democratic Mayor Karen Bass by 26,000 votes or about 3 percentage points on Wednesday night, Decision Desk Headquarters projected a win for the progressive who entered the mayoral race late and centered her campaign on solving the city’s homelessness crisis as well as addressing the cost of living.
With about 72% of votes cast late Wednesday, urban planner Raman had 51.7% of the vote compared to Bass’ 48.3%.
Raman, who has a background in fighting homelessness and served as executive director of the anti-workplace sexual harassment group Time’s Up before winning her City Council seat in 2020, was endorsed by climate action groups, the hospitality workers union UNITE Here Local 11, the public education advocacy group Eastside Padres Contra la Privatización, and the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Kurt Petersen, co-president of UNITE Here Local 11, told Politico that Raman’s projected victory was “a monsoon, an earthquake, a leveling, a restructuring” that served as a rebuke by voters of the nation’s second-largest city’s political establishment, including the rest of the City Council members, all of who supported Bass.
“It was all of the above,” Petersen said. “The political class of Los Angeles was absent at the Nithya Raman party because they were all with the incumbent... Even though every city councilperson said they were standing with Karen Bass, not very many of the people they represent followed them to the polls.”
Polls ahead of Election Day showed younger voters across the city leaning towards Raman, who has called for a streamlined process for approving housing projects and an end to “indefinite delays,” an Office of Tenant Protections for the roughly 64% of Angelenos who are renters, and a reorganization of the city’s homelessness interventions “to quickly shelter and house the largest number of people with the same dollars.”
She has criticized Bass’ Inside Safe anti-homelessness program as ineffective and expensive, with more than $300 million spent to house 6,000 people and 40% of those served by the program returning to the streets.
“Despite repeated efforts from the City Council to reduce costs in the program, Inside Safe costs an average of $85,000 a year for a motel room and services, and some rooms go as high as $100,000 per year,” reads Raman’s campaign website. “It is the most expensive temporary housing program in the city by far, and people are staying in the motel rooms for close to a year. For the same amount of money, we could rent three apartments using a short-term rental voucher and provide intensive services—housing more people in a program that has delivered much better outcomes.”
Raman also highlighted a nearly 50% reduction in homelessness in her own district, even as rates have risen across the city, and pledged to reduce city-wide rates by 50% before the 2028 Olympics.
Ballot-tallying continued past Election Day, with officials counting late ballots that typically are cast by younger and more progressive voters.
“This city’s government has made solving problems look impossible for so long that I heard from people across this city who started to believe that it was impossible,” Raman told supporters who gathered at her election night party on Tuesday. “Hopelessness can be fatal for a city, but this campaign refused to accept that. You refused to accept that.”
Raman has centered efforts to make the heavily car-dependent Los Angeles safer for pedestrians and bikers, crack down on “disgraceful” delays in fixing 30,000 street lights across the city, and ramping up public transportation with “permanent, dedicated bus lanes and more buses running more often.”
“Nithya Raman winning the mayor’s office in the second largest city in the US is in my opinion the most important election of this season,” said Matthew Lewis, communications director for California YIMBY. “Just the ground shifting on housing, transit, bicycles, and walkable urbanism.”
Raman also denounced the mayor for what she called a “dysfunctional” and “indefensibly slow” recovery from the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles nearly two years ago. She championed the creation of a “Recovery District” to “coordinate the recovery across jurisdictions, bring hundreds of millions of dollars into the Palisades, and ensure that local residents are at the table when decisions are made.”
Bass received an endorsement from the Los Angeles Police Department’s union, which poured more than $5 million into the push to defeat Raman. The union also donated $200,000 to the Republican Central Committee of Los Angeles County, which sent out anti-Raman mailers to voters.
Kenneth Meija, the progressive city controller who won his reelection bid in June, said on election night that he was “so damn proud to be the only one in City Hall who supported Mayor Raman.”
“They were like, ‘Yo, the entire political establishment is supporting Mayor Bass,’” said Meija. “And I’m like, ‘So? She’s got Kenneth Mejia. She’s got the people.’”
Friday, November 06, 2026
Could AI help protect buildings from earthquakes?
New University of East London research could help engineers uncover structural weaknesses and better understand how buildings withstand seismic shocks.
Researchers at the University of East London (UEL) have developed a new framework for assessing earthquake risks, using AI-assisted technology to examine how soil conditions, ground shaking and structural strength influence a building's ability to withstand seismic activity.
Led by Dr Jawed Qureshi, Senior Lecturer in Structural Engineering and Design, the study tested a computer model of a five-storey reinforced concrete building using recorded ground-motion data from the devastating Northridge and Kobe earthquakes in 1994 and 1995, drawing on four specialist engineering technologies to assess everything from soil conditions to structural strength in a single coordinated workflow. The research is published in Buildings journal.
Understanding what happens when the ground shakes
Designing buildings to withstand earthquakes is a complex challenge. Engineers must consider not only the strength of an earthquake but also the ground beneath a building, how the structure moves and whether its individual components can withstand the forces involved. These factors are often assessed using separate engineering tools, making it difficult to understand how they interact and influence a building's overall performance.
The UEL study explored a framework described as Proto-Artificial General Intelligence (Proto-AGI), which brings together four specialist technologies under human supervision to provide a more complete assessment of structural risks.
Dr Qureshi said:
“Structural engineers have always known that buildings do not fail in isolation. What happens beneath the ground affects how a structure moves, and how a structure moves determines whether it survives. Now, for the first time, we have a framework that joins all those pieces together.”
Lessons from two major earthquakes
To demonstrate the approach, the researchers used recorded ground motions from the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California and the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, two of the most destructive earthquakes of the twentieth century.
They applied the earthquake records to a computer model of a five-storey reinforced concrete building to examine how it would respond.
The results revealed that although the Northridge record produced approximately 3.4 times the median seismic demand of the Kobe record at the building's natural period, the difference in peak structural movement was only 1.32 times.
The comparison shows that the relationship between ground shaking and structural movement is not straightforward. A larger difference in the shaking a building experiences does not necessarily translate into an equally large difference in its movement.
The characteristics of the earthquake, the soil beneath the building and the structure’s design all influence the outcome, which is why stronger shaking does not necessarily produce a proportionately greater amount of building movement.
Examining these factors together could help engineers understand how vulnerabilities develop across a structure, rather than considering each part of the assessment in isolation.
Could AI change the future of earthquake engineering?
The research explores how AI-assisted technologies could improve the way engineers assess buildings and infrastructure.
Rather than replacing engineers, the proposed approach brings digital tools together, with human specialists overseeing the process and interpreting the results.
This coordinated approach could provide a foundation for more advanced engineering systems, combining information from different disciplines to build a clearer understanding of structural performance.
The findings also highlight how digital technologies could help the construction industry develop infrastructure better able to withstand natural hazards.
Further testing is needed before the approach could be used routinely in engineering practice.
The initial study used one soil profile and two earthquake records, with engineers manually coordinating information between the technologies. Future research could explore larger earthquake datasets, greater automation and information from building inspections and structural monitoring.
Dr Qureshi added:
“The goal was never to replace engineering judgement with AI. It was to give engineers a clearer, more complete picture before they make their decisions. That is what this research delivers.”
The research, led by Dr Jawed Qureshi and co-authored with Bala Karthika Balakrishnan, is published in Buildings journal and freely available at https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16163324
Journal
Buildings
Thursday, November 05, 2026
Earthquake rattles Mosaic potash mine in Saskatchewan
Esterhazy is the world’s largest potash operation. (Image courtesy of Mosaic.)
Mosaic (NYSE: MOS) says a magnitude 3.4 earthquake near its Esterhazy potash operations in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan on Tuesday is not expected to disrupt production, despite striking an area previously affected by mining-induced seismic activity.
The earthquake occurred at 7:04 a.m. CST on Nov. 3, about nine kilometres east-northeast of Esterhazy, according to Natural Resources Canada’s Earthquakes Canada website. Workers felt the tremor in a mined-out section of the K3 underground mine, but all employees were accounted for and safety inspections have been completed, the company said.
“Mining induced seismic activity in this area is common, and our facilities are engineered with seismic loading in mind,” Mosaic said in a statement. “While the recent event occurred far from current mining areas and presents no immediate safety concerns, we continue to advance our understanding of the geological properties of the K3 ore body and will work with external experts to review seismic activity.”
The incident comes as Mosaic grapples with geological challenges at Esterhazy that have already weighed on potash production. In third-quarter results released the same day, the US fertilizer producer said lower-than-expected ore grades at the mine contributed to reduced output and a downward revision to its full-year production forecast.
Seismic history
Earthquakes Canada classified Tuesday’s tremor as a “suspected mining-induced event.” The region experienced three earthquakes in 2025, including two within three months, which the federal agency also linked to possible mining activity.
The latest event follows a fatal accident at Esterhazy’s K3 mine late last year, when a worker died following an underground collapse.
Esterhazy is one of Mosaic’s key potash production centres, with a nameplate capacity of 7.8 million tonnes annually. The complex comprises the K1, K2 and K3 mines, with construction of K3 completed in 2022.
About 1,200 people work above and below ground at the site, according to the company’s website.
Production pressures
News of the seismic event came on the same day Mosaic reported a third-quarter net loss of $72 million, or 23¢ per share, compared with net income of $411 million, or $1.29 per share, a year earlier. Revenue fell about 10% to $3.1 billion, while adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) declined to $324 million from $806 million.
The company’s potash division generated $643 million in sales, down from $695 million a year earlier, as sales volumes slipped to 2.1 million tonnes from 2.3 million tonnes. Segment adjusted EBITDA fell to $284 million from $329 million.
Mosaic said abnormal geological conditions at Esterhazy reduced ore grades during the quarter, prompting it to lower its 2026 potash production forecast to 8.6 million tonnes. The company expects the grade issues to be temporary and continues to target annual output exceeding 9 million tonnes over the longer term.
Despite the challenges, potash production costs improved from the previous quarter, falling to $73 per tonne from $84 as higher operating rates at Esterhazy and Colonsay helped spread fixed costs across greater output.
Mosaic expects fourth-quarter potash sales of 2.3 million to 2.6 million tonnes, with realized mine-gate prices ranging from $255 to $275 per tonne.
The company said it would continue studying the geological properties of the K3 ore body with external experts, as it works to manage seismic activity and improve production performance at Esterhazy.
Wednesday, November 04, 2026
Mitigation force proposed as a third fundamental element of urban safety
The SEM Theory sets mitigation alongside risk source and risk exposure as an element in its own right, and carries it through to a Space–Air–Ground monitoring workflow tested on an urban village in southern China.
Cities are open complex giant systems, and the populations, wealth and critical functions they hold are highly concentrated. Their safe, continuous operation therefore bears directly on national security and development. A paper in ENGINEERING Cities recasts what urban safety means: not the elimination of risk, but a city's ability to hold its essential functions inside an acceptable safety boundary while under disturbance, and to keep and defend that state afterwards. Qingrui Yue of the Research Institute of Urbanization and Urban Safety at the University of Science & Technology Beijing led the work.
Most of the paper is spent building the Risk Source–Risk Exposure–Mitigation Force Theory of Urban Safety, or SEM Theory, into something that can be written down mathematically. Risk Source is any hazard-producing entity, event or process that may threaten urban safety, and the authors give it three fundamental characteristics: coupling and cascading, urban specificity, and macro-environmental sensitivity. Risk Exposure is the people, assets and systems that take the effects; in cities it appears in four forms the authors call the "4H" patterns, namely high population density, high asset concentration, a high concentration of elements critical to national security, and high systemic coupling. Mitigation Force combines risk cognition, mitigation organization, mitigation technology and mitigation resources, and the paper places it at the same analytical level as the other two elements. That placement is the argument. For systems that depend on the intrinsic robustness, redundancy and recoverability of exposed entities, mitigation had been folded into wider ideas such as resilience and capacity rather than treated as an element in its own right.
Roles inside the theory are not fixed. Damaged infrastructure can turn into a secondary risk source. A protective facility that fails stops protecting and starts producing risk. The same physical thing may sit inside Risk Exposure in one scenario and inside Mitigation Force in another. On top of that comes a two-layer formulation: heterogeneous observations are converted into functional equivalents, and safety is read off a safety index S whose theoretical critical threshold is 0.5. Above 0.5 a system can generally maintain its functions. At 0.5 it sits at critical equilibrium; below 0.5 it is overloaded or functionally impaired.
"Mitigation Force is not the arithmetic sum of individual measures, resources, and capabilities," Yue said. "Rather, it emerges through the coordination of these elements across departments, systems, and levels of governance, and its intervention may be directed toward Risk Source, Risk Exposure, or the risk-evolution process." Modeling it independently, he argued, "frees proactive risk reduction from its status as an appendage of 'resilience' and 'capacity,' making it a quantifiable and optimizable element of urban safety assessment."
The second half of the paper turns the theory into a monitoring system. Spaceborne observation, airborne sensing and ground-based monitoring are placed in one spatiotemporal reference. The combination is then asked to answer three questions in order: how to sense across scales, at high precision and at high density; how to interpret what has been sensed by embedding multidimensional knowledge; and how to fuse information across scales into an assessment of safety performance. The workflow was tried on a self-built housing community in an urban village in southern China (180,000 m², more than 350 buildings). It ran in four steps. InSAR identified 26 buildings with abnormal settlement among the more than 350; air–ground integrated monitoring then examined roof loading, surface damage, surrounding engineering and ground collapse; a neural network narrowed the list to 15 suspected high-risk buildings; and ground-based cross-validation confirmed five of them as dangerous. The manual inspection workload fell by roughly 96%. The authors read the result as evidence that the chain from conceptual definition through theoretical modeling to operational monitoring holds together, and that a community can be screened quickly and accurately.
The case itself stops at building safety and at community scale. Extending it to lifeline systems such as energy, transport, and water supply and drainage would take definitions and calibration specific to each subsystem: functional units, monitoring parameters, safety thresholds, interdependency pathways. The paper closes with four trends it expects to shape that work: intensifying external disturbance under climate change; geopolitical change and armed conflict widening the scope of urban safety; the aging of both urban assets and populations; and industrial transformation broadening the risk spectrum.
Other authors are affiliated with the Shenzhen Technology Institute of Urban Public Safety, Beijing Normal University, and the Institute of Engineering Mechanics, China Earthquake Administration.
Qingrui Yue, Zhongqi Shi, Zhen Xu, Kai Liu, Lin Zhou, Nan Jin, Yuzhou Liu, Yuan Tian, Jianxin Zhang, Zhiwei Liu, Jiale Qian, Zhichao Lin, Donglian Gu, Yuxing Xie, Jian Ma. The Risk Source–Risk Exposure–Mitigation Force Theory of Urban Safety and Its Enabling Space–Air–Ground Integrated Monitoring Technologies. ENGINEERING Cities, 2026, 1 (1) : 41-70 DOI:10.2738/ENGC.2026.0016
About the Journal
ENGINEERING Cities focuses on key scientific questions and challenges in the field of urban science and engineering. It particularly emphasizes international frontier topics such as urban complex mega-systems, urban safety and resilience, urban renewal and sustainable development, climate change and the urban environment, digital twins and smart cities, and urban governance. The journal is committed to building a high-level international academic exchange platform, promoting deep interdisciplinary integration, encouraging the coordinated development of original theories, technologies, and engineering practices, advancing the understanding of urban systems and technological innovation, and fostering the global development of emerging interdisciplinary fields in urban science.
