Assessment of Seismic Loss in Surakarta School Buildings

Abstract

Surakarta is a relatively small yet is categorized as a densely populated city. There are a lot of types of public buildings, such as hospitals, supermarkets, government infrastructures, and school buildings. The city has more than 1100 school buildings threatened by many potential earthquakes. The possibility of an earthquake hitting Surakarta may be fatal and cause significant losses of buildings. However, studies on seismic hazard of the city are still very rare and need more attention. This paper presents a recent study on the seismic loss assessment of school building in Surakarta. The survey has been conducted by a team to visit, check, record and document all the required information to obtain exposure, combined with the information from google map application, while the seismic hazard analysis was carried out using the event-based stochastic method. An open-source application, OpenQuake, was utilized to assess the seismic loss and the results were presented here. The elaborated analysis is presented concluding that the exposure and vulnerability of school buildings are very important factors to determine a risk of loss. It indicates that the wooden school building contributes a highest risk of loss, whereas the confined masonry ones give a lowest risk. Among the whole sub districts in Surakarta, it is assessed that Laweyan suffers the biggest seismic loss of 2.36 million USD due to 500 years return period earthquake and 5.39 million USD due to 2500 years return period earthquake. These results of this study are valuable information for government in order to overcome disaster mitigation policy of Surakarta.