A career spent designing infrastructure solutions has proven to Dr Anne Gibbs FIEAust EngExec the undeniable connection between culturally informed engineering and truly resilient outcomes.
The purpose of resilient engineering was made abundantly clear to civil engineer Dr Anne Gibbs FIEAust EngExec, CEO of the Asset Management Council, when she travelled to the Indonesian island of Nias following a destructive earthquake in 2005.
More than 1000 people had died during the event, with around 30 per cent of buildings in the city of Gunungsitoli collapsing. A large part of the role played by Gibbs, an engineer deployed with RedR Australia, was to assess public infrastructure damage, including schools, hospitals, roads, churches and bridges.
Most of the houses that had collapsed, she realised, were built from concrete. These larger, more substantial homes typically belonged to affluent residents, while those with less wealth lived in modest, wooden houses. Those traditional houses had remained intact while the heavier concrete ones crumbled as a result of poor structural design and an absence of reinforcing and tie beams.
“It happened while everyone was asleep, so a lot of wealthier people in these houses died,” said Gibbs, who has also served for several years as an adviser to the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure.
“Then, the people in the mountains who wanted to bring their rubber to the businessmen, who would sell it onwards, had no-one to sell their rubber to. Therefore, they couldn’t earn enough money to buy rice. They began to starve. Everything we do as engineers affects all of society; it all has a knock-on effect.”
Gibbs has carried out similar roles elsewhere. In East Timor, under military protection, she helped women establish a sustainable hostel after many of the region’s men had been killed during Indonesian occupation. In Africa, with the United Nations Refugee Agency, she worked among refugee communities along the Rwanda-Tanzania border. And in Romania, she helped tackle waste management challenges that had significantly threatened public health.
What does any of this have to do with infrastructure asset management and resilience in Australia? Plenty, she said. And the sooner we learn these lessons, the better the outcomes will be.
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Close collaboration crucial
In Australian engineering right now, Gibbs said, there is a strong focus on the design and construction phase. But, increasingly, engineers are realising that resilience and sustainability, as well as best-practice risk management, comes only from whole-of-life planning, including operation, maintenance and decommissioning, or circular repurposing.
“The operation and maintenance phase of a project represents about 80 per cent of the cost over the life of the asset,” she said. “There’s a great opportunity to improve how it’s being done.”
A thorough consideration of the operation and maintenance phase looks at material selection for the intended use for the full period, including reuse at end of life. It plans for integration with the infrastructural, human and natural ecosystems around it. And, in an age of increasing climate-induced severe weather events, it allows for climate adaptation, demonstrating a deep understanding of disaster risk reduction.
None of this is possible without close collaboration with all stakeholders, particularly end users and others in the local community.
“The reason I was successful on Nias Island was because, as soon as I went there, I went to see the town chief,” Gibbs said. “He immediately gave me resources to help me, and the ability to connect to the local public works department and to others in the community, who helped me understand exactly where the worst areas were, and what was and wasn’t needed.
“You need to work in collaboration with the local community if you want to be effective and provide infrastructure people will use and maintain.”
All projects, whether designed for a modern city centre or in the middle of a disaster zone, must be community-driven, as opposed to engineered solutions imposed from above, or from the outside.
Gibbs’s doctoral research, focusing on cultural risk in engineering projects, revealed that even the most technically sound projects can fail if they don’t align with local customs, social structures or governance systems. And so, understanding the way people work, how they connect, what drives their decisions and more, is vital to project success.
A lack of understanding of the way people will use a piece of infrastructure during its life, and how they will move, live and work around it, will add cost at best. At worst, it will result in complete failure, potentially bringing injury or death.
“It may be you don’t end up wanting to build the originally planned structure at all,” she said. “It might be better to look at a do-nothing approach. Or perhaps it should be repurposed as something else.
“You can’t just come in as an engineer and think, ‘This village needs a well, so I’ll do them a favour by drilling one right in the middle of the village’. Because it’s absolutely possible the daily walk to get water is vital to the people in a number of other ways.”
How Australia’s engineers can do better
Gibbs’s research, knowledge and experience confirm that resilient engineering isn’t just about stronger materials or smarter technology, but also about integrating cultural understanding into decision-making.
In disaster recovery, in city planning and in all other facets of infrastructure development, engineers must work harder to factor in aspects of the human and cultural experience.
“All of this is important because, as engineers, we want to make the world a better place,” Gibbs said. “We do our work because we want to improve society.
“Resilience in engineering is about breaking the damage cycle. It is an investment in the future, in the entire life cycle. It is about risk reduction for the future and long-term planning, which demands an asset management approach.
“Most of all, it is about involving the community so you know up-front exactly how that asset is going to be used, operated and maintained. Combine that with the excellent technical engineering that we do so well in Australia, and we’ll be able to realise better value from our infrastructure.”
This story was originally published in the August 2025 edition of create.
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This is old news, unfortunately lessons are not learnt easily. Since the USDOD introduced life cycle costing and logistics support analysis in the mid 1980s, there have been many versions and three letter acronyms to try and attain properly designed and costed solutions using realistic specs. “resilient engineering” is just another buzzword.
Point 1: if the design doesn’t work, system fails. do not pass GO. earthquakes and concrete require special attention, ask San Francisco. Unfortunately engineers have a bad track record, often pushed by those prepared to test the laws of physics.
Point 2: design for support – least cost for best performance.
Point 3: support the design – ie spares, training/competency, operations, etc required by point 2 – deviate and your risk increases