Abstract
For both spiritual and cultural reasons, churches are an essential part of the historical heritage of several countries worldwide, including Europe, Americas and Australasia. The extreme damage that occurred during the 2016–2017 Central Italy seismic swarm highlighted once again the noteworthy seismic vulnerability of unreinforced masonry churches, which exhibited several collapses and caused uncountable losses to the Italian artistic heritage. The seismic performance of 158 affected buildings was analyzed in the aftermath of the main shocks. The failure modes activated by the earthquakes were identified making reference to the local mechanisms currently considered in Italy for post-seismic assessment of churches. The structural damage of the investigated buildings, related to 21 mechanisms rather than to an overall global response, was explained resorting to empirical statistical procedures taking into account ground motion intensity and structural details that can worsen or improve the seismic performance. Finally, parametric fragility curves were derived selecting those structural details that mostly influence the damage by means of the likelihood-ratio test. Developed models can be used in future territorial-scale scenario or risk analyses.
Highlights
A strong sequence of earthquakes struck Central Italy during 2016–2017, starting on August 24, 2016 causing severe damage and hundreds of casualties over a wide area (Fig. 1), within the boundaries of Marches, Umbria, Latium and Abruzzi regions (Mazzoni et al 2018)
The large number of churches present in Italy frequently requires territorial-scale risk analyses, resorting to fragility assessment delivered from basic information collected after a rapid visual inspection, rather than performing structural analyses based on accurate geometry and details survey, as well as on material parameters investigation (Pirchio et al 2021)
It is worth highlighting that regressions provide a predicted damage, whereas the proposed parametric fragility curves deliver a distribution of probability for each damage level, resulting in an enriched statistical model
Summary
A strong sequence of earthquakes struck Central Italy during 2016–2017, starting on August 24, 2016 causing severe damage and hundreds of casualties over a wide area (Fig. 1), within the boundaries of Marches, Umbria, Latium and Abruzzi regions (Mazzoni et al 2018). The large number of churches present in Italy frequently requires territorial-scale risk analyses, resorting to fragility assessment delivered from basic information collected after a rapid visual inspection, rather than performing structural analyses based on accurate geometry and details survey, as well as on material parameters investigation (Pirchio et al 2021). In order to define parametric fragility curves associating the damage related to each collapse mechanism with ground motion intensity and vulnerability indicators of churches, the observed behavior of a sample of 158 Central Italy URM churches is analyzed Information about these buildings is the result of inspections performed by the authors or by photo and video documentation made available by the Corps of Firefighters. The latter group of churches did not suffer any significant damage from the prior earthquake, because their inspection was not requested by the stakeholders until after the second main earthquake
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