Beyond Building Code: How Disaster Response Experience Strengthens Structural Design

July 6th, 2026

For most structural engineers, a career is spent designing buildings and infrastructure and solving complex engineering challenges. For Brett Rylands, PE, StS-1, LEED AP, it also means helping communities respond to some of their most critical moments.

Brett is a structural engineer at Galloway based in the Orlando, Florida area with more than three decades of experience in structural design and analysis. For more than a decade, he has also served as a FEMA-certified Structural Specialist (StS-1), responding to natural disasters, structural failures, and other emergencies.

Brett Rylands completing his rope and rescue structural collapse training course.

His involvement in disaster response developed through his professional engagement with the structural engineering community, including work with the Florida Structural Engineers Association and contributions to second-responder guidance through the NCSEA Structural Engineering Emergency Response (SEER) effort. He was later selected to join Florida Task Force 4, becoming part of its on-call engineering roster supporting emergency response operations across Central Florida.

“What keeps me coming back is the intensity of the work,” Rylands said. “I’m working in a highly collaborative environment that few people ever get to experience, making fast-paced decisions alongside incredibly experienced fire and rescue professionals. There’s always an opportunity to learn.”

Engineering Lessons from the Field

The StS-1 credential is part of FEMA’s structure specialist program, developed to embed engineering expertise directly into search-and-rescue and life-safety missions in the aftermath of natural disasters and infrastructure failures.

In practice, that means working in environments where conditions can change by the minute and where decisions often determine whether a structure is safe enough for rescue personnel to enter. Those experiences influence how Brett evaluates structural performance long after the emergency response is over.

“Structures that have failed hit a limit state somewhere and you can see the weak link in real time in the field,” Rylands said. “Seeing how buildings perform during hurricanes and other disasters gives us insights we can bring back into everyday design work. Building code doesn’t capture everything.”

For clients, that firsthand experience translates into tangible benefits:

• Exposure to disaster conditions: Designing for disaster-prone regions informed by firsthand experience in hurricane, flood, and structural collapse environments.
• Insight beyond building code: Understanding real failure behavior by observing how systems break down in ways analytical models alone cannot fully capture.
• System-level diagnosis: Identifying hidden vulnerabilities in load paths, connections, and overall structural stability.
• Performance-driven improvement: Translating field lessons into design and retrofit strategies that strengthen long-term resilience.
  

  Brett Rylands on site of the residential building collapse in Surfside, Florida.

Brett’s more than 10 years of deployment experience includes supporting the evaluation of a collapsed 12-story residential building in Surfside, Florida. Using a total station, he helped monitor structural conditions and determine whether portions of the structure were safe for search and rescue crews to enter.

In another deployment, he supported high-rise construction monitoring when scaffolding was observed shifting away from a structure. Continuous movement data confirmed instability, and Brett and the team moved quickly to stabilize the system before a potential collapse.

Ultimately, his disaster response experience reinforces a core principle: structural performance is proven under real conditions, not just calculated ones. The objective is not only code compliance, but resilience under uncertainty. By linking field observation with design practice, Rylands brings lessons from extreme environments back into everyday engineering decisions, strengthening how Galloway designs for performance when it matters most. To learn more or connect with our structural team, contact us.

Brett Rylands completing his rope and rescue structural collapse training course.

A Growing Need for Structural Specialists

Brett notes that the number of engineers holding FEMA Structural Specialist certification remains limited and is not keeping pace with demand across task forces nationwide. He hopes increased awareness of the program will encourage more structural engineers to pursue the certification and contribute when communities need it most.

For Brett, the motivation is deeply personal.

“Personally, it’s a chance to give back to the community, to help people out in their most dire moments.”