Damage seismic scenarios for Angra do Heroísmo, Azores (Portugal)

Abstract

Angra do Heroismo, located in Terceira Island, is the main town of the Central Group of Azores Archipelago and it is classified as World Heritage by Unesco. The preservation of this patrimony, located inside a seismic region, includes the implementation of a policy to protect it against earthquakes. The development of credible damage scenarios could help this objective, as they can be used in prevention measures to minimize the impact of future earthquakes. Two methods were used for seismic damage estimation: the capacity spectrum method and a new method, based on the direct response of a 1D non-linear oscillator to simulate the building seismic performance. Both methods seem to overestimate the damages for the near sources, but this could be due to the empirical model used to estimate the input ground motion. Comparison with the damage observed after the January 1st, 1980 earthquake show a large discrepancy with an underestimation bias, which can be explained, mainly, by the difference of building performance and on the plausible hypothesis of 2D site effects.