Seismic Risk Assessment of Italian School Buildings

Most of the Italian school buildings were not designed according to seismic criteria and, therefore, they are vulnerable from a seismic point of view. A clear proof of this was the catastrophic collapse of the school at San Giuliano during the October 2002 earthquake: thirty people died, of which twenty seven were young students and one their teacher. After this seismic event, the process for identifying the most seismically vulnerable school buildings was started in Italy, with the final aim of improving their strength. Furthermore, several school buildings, mainly located in the historical town centre were damaged during the recent seismic event of L’Aquila (April 6, 2009), as reported by Salvatore et al. (Rapporto dei danni provocati dall’evento sismico del 6 aprile sugli edifici scolastici del centro storico de L’Aquila, http://​www.​reluis.​it). The proposed research work was driven by the idea of defining a methodology that implements an analysis in successive steps with an increasing level of detail. Only the buildings with seismic risk higher than a given threshold go through to the following phase, so that the number of buildings analysed decreases at each phase. The implemented procedure follows some well known works published in literature (Grant et al. 2007; Crowley et al. 2008). The definition of a prioritisation scheme of intervention is strictly due to the high number of school buildings (almost 50000) that cannot be deeply analysed considering the limited resources available. The school building location, the exposure data and seismic input information are implemented in a WebGIS platform through interactive maps and tabs. By means of the developed WebGIS tools, the seismic risk analyses of the school buildings are performed and the obtained results, in terms of maps and tables, are herein presented.