The paper analyses the seismic fragility of precast reinforced concrete buildings using observational damage data gathered after the 2012 Emilia earthquakes that struck Northern Italy. The damage level in 1890 buildings was collected, classified and examined. Damage matrices were then evaluated, and finally, empirical fragility curves were fitted using Bayesian regression. Building damage was classified using a six-level scale derived from EMS-98. The completeness of the database and the spatial distribution of the buildings investigated were analysed using cadastral data as a reference. The intensity of the ground motion was quantified by the maximum horizontal peak ground acceleration, which was obtained from ShakeMaps

The 2012 Emilia (Italy) earthquakes struck a highly industrialized area including several thousands of industrial prefabricated buildings. Due to the lack of specific design and detailing for earthquake resistance, precast reinforced concrete (RC) buildings suffered from severe damages and even partial or total collapses in many cases. The present study reports a data inventory of damages from field survey on prefabricated buildings. The damage database concerns more than 1400 buildings (about 30% of the total precast building stock in the struck region). Making use of the available shakemaps of the two mainshocks, damage distributions were related with distance from the nearest epicentre and corresponding Pseudo-Spectral Acceleration for a period of 1 second (PSA at 1 s) or Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA). It was found that about 90% of the severely damaged to collapsed buildings included into the database stay within 16 km from the epicentre and experienced a PSA larger than 0.12 g. Moreover, 90% of slightly to moderately damaged buildings are located at less than 25 km from the epicentre and were affected by a PSA larger than 0.06 g. Nevertheless, the undamaged buildings examined are almost uniformly distributed over the struck region and 10% of them suffered a PSA not lower than 0.19g. The damage distributions in terms of the maximum experienced PGA show a sudden increase for PGA≥0.28 g. In this PGA interval, 442 buildings were collected in the database; 55% of them suffered severe damages up to collapse, 32% reported slight to moderate damages, whereas the remaining 13% resulted undamaged.

No abstract

No abstract