Lionel Lemay, NRMCA’s senior vice president of sustainability, will present at the first annual Residential Building Design and Construction Conference, February 20-21, in Bethlehem, PA. The conference is organized by the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center (PHRC) at Penn State University and provides a forum for researchers, design professionals, manufacturers, builders and code officials to present the latest advancements, innovations and projects related to residential buildings. 

Lemay will present a paper titled Concrete Building Systems: Disaster Resilient Solutions for Safer Communities he co-authored with Tien Peng of NRMCA and Bruce Cody of the Pennsylvania Aggregates and Concrete Association. The paper, which was one of only 40 accepted by the conference technical committee, presents a four-step process for resilient construction, including adopting a basic building code, promoting market driven resilience programs, adopting more robust resilience standards and building with more robust materials such as concrete. It provides an overview of concrete building systems that have the mass and hardness to resist high winds and flying debris of tornadoes and the devastating effects of flood, fire and earthquakes.