An Italian platform for the seismic risk assessment of school buildings

Abstract

The safety of school buildings is a highly relevant and topical issue and the earthquake is one of the actions from which they must be “protected”. Many factors affect it, both from the structural and non-structural point of view. To identify the most cost-benefit seismic mitigation program is fundamental to have an overview of the school heritage in our peninsula, the vulnerability and the seismic risk which schools are subjected to. In this context, within the MARS (Seismic Risk Maps) research project funded by the Italian Department of Civil Protection, an online platform developed by EUCENTRE, with the close collaboration of the Network of University Laboratories for Earthquake Engineering (ReLUIS) has been adopted to calculate the seismic risk of school buildings. The platform IRMA (Italian Risk MAps), initially focused only to residential buildings, has been further developed with a specific tool dedicated to the evaluation of seismic risk maps for school buildings at national level. It allows to upload different exposure/vulnerability models and sets of fragility curves and to combine them to obtain seismic risk maps at municipal, provincial, regional and national scale. The hazard integrated in IRMA corresponds to the hazard model adopted by the regulations at national level.