After the 2003 Paso Robles earthquake, seven retrofitted unreinforced masonry buildings walked away nearly untouched. The ones that hadn't been strengthened? Torn down. Mason Moritz, once a structural engineer at Holmes in San Francisco, now a field engineer for Python Fasteners, joins the podcast to explain why that story keeps repeating, and why most engineers never hear it.

Python manufactures the first ICC-certified, seismically rated anchor for existing masonry, born out of the Christchurch earthquake's real-world stress test on New Zealand's historic buildings. Mason's job now is closing the gap he used to sit on the other side of: most engineering programs teach little to no masonry design, so URM gets written off as a liability instead of understood as an asset.

In this episode:

• The Paso Robles case study: retrofitted URM buildings vs. the ones that got demolished
• How the Christchurch earthquake shaped Python's anchor research
• Why URM has a bad reputation engineers haven't been taught to question
• Mason's path from Holmes Structural Engineers to studying historic buildings in Portugal and the Czech Republic
• Closing the education gap: Berkeley, Cal Poly SLO, and Trento research partnerships
• Stabilize-in-place vs. rip-out-and-replace, and what's at stake for historic building stock
• Why reuse is the ultimate sustainability move: "the greenest building is the one that's already there"

Learn more about the Northwest Masonry Institute: https://masonryinstitute.com/in-the-mix