Building damage assessment after the 2009 Abruzzi earthquake

Abstract

Soon after the earthquake that damaged L’Aquila municipality and its Province in the Abruzzi Region, Italy, on the 6th of April 2009, a widespread damage and usability assessment of buildings was launched. In 3 months, about 70,000 buildings were inspected, with the AeDES form, by public servants and professionals coordinated by the Italian Civil Protection Department. The paper, after describing the procedures and the form that were used for the assessment, discusses the time evolution of the inspections and analyses the data on building type and seismic damage. The empirical damage distribution conditional upon seismic intensity and building type is provided and the role of several vulnerability factors, such as the quality of masonry, the construction year, the number of stories, and the pre-existing damage, is highlighted. Lastly the damage consequences, such as the immediate occupancy conditional upon building damage and building type, are reported

Analysis of the Population Assistance and Returning Home in the Reconstruction Process of the 2009 L’Aquila Earthquake

“…Over 75,000 in situ inspections were carried out by teams of expert surveyors (over 8000), to evaluate buildings damage levels and to define their usability rating. The surveys involved all buildings located in the areas with macro-seismic intensity, according to Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg (MCS) seismic scale, MCS ≥ VI; in addition, in areas with macro-seismic intensity MCS < VI, the survey was carried out only upon owner request [14]. The AeDES (post-earthquake damage and safety assessment and short term countermeasures) survey form [15] was used as a tool for the seismic damage and usability assessment.…”

Empirical Damage and Actual Repair Costs on Masonry Private Buildings After L’aquila Earthquake

“…The data related to these buildings are presented and discussed in this section in terms of: vulnerability classes; construction age and number of storeys, severity and extent of damage detected by in situ inspections on building structural and nonstructural components, and repair costs. The building features contained in the AeDES survey forms, as type of vertical and horizontal structures, allow us to divided the dataset in three vulnerability classes, A, B and C, as a function of the building seismic behavior according to criteria adopted in [7,10]. The most vulnerable class, A, consists of 405 (about 40%) buildings while the other vulnerable classes, B and C, consist of 216 and 379 buildings (about 22% and 38%), respectively.…”

“…In [8,9] starting from the procedure reported in [7] only the damages detected on the vertical structures to find a global damage index has been taken into account. In [10] the same approach has been assumed, but the damage extension on the structural components has not been taken into account. By contrast, the damage grades D2-D3 and D4-D5 were split into the corresponding EMS-98 damage state depending only on the mean damage detected on VS for the building class in the selected location: the higher the mean damage, the higher the probability of being in the heaviest DS.…”

A Class-Oriented Large Scale Comparison With Post-Earthquake Damage for Abruzzi Region

“…The 2009 L'Aquila (Abruzzi Region) earthquake hit 130 municipalities (Dolce and Goretti [18]) and caused extensive damage to public and private structures, to artistic and cultural heritage of L'Aquila and provinces.…”

“…The field inspections carried out after L'Aquila earthquake allowed to collect a database containing first-level data, on 74254 buildings (Dolce and Goretti [18]), out of which, 8750 is constituted by Moment Resisting Frame (MRF) RC buildings characterized by a residential use and located in Municipalities classified with macroseismic intensity in the Mercalli-CancaniSieberg (MCS) scale (Sieberg 1930) (IMCS) higher than VI.…”