Petra

Just find a local AGU member, have them sponsor you, and submit it anyway.
It would help to have the abstract read from an engineering point of view:

Earthquakes present some specific dangers, these dangers were not fully mitigated
in existing code, we took these steps to fix it. (If that's the story you want to tell.)

My point is that you'll get a better reception if you tell them some history they
don't already know rather than simply explain stuff they might think everyone
should already know.

John