Seismic Risk Assessment of Urban Areas by a Hybrid Empirical-Analytical Procedure Based on Peak Ground Acceleration

Abstract

The seismic risk assessment of existing urban areas provides important information for the process of seismic risk reduction in different phases of planning and emergency management. Between different large-scale assessment approaches, a vulnerability index method is often used for the first screening of the buildings and vulnerability classification. However, this method cannot fully predict the effects of a specific seismic action on buildings. This paper fully extends the scale of the settlement and properly upgrades a methodology previously proposed by authors to predict seismic damage and the risk to a restricted number of masonry buildings in the Croatian settlement Kaštel Kambelovac located along the Adriatic coast. The proposed approach is based on a hybrid empirical-analytical procedure that combines seismic vulnerability indices with critical peak ground accelerations for different limit states computed through a non-linear pushover analysis. The procedure’s outcomes are the computation of a relationship linking vulnerability indices to peak ground acceleration for a series of states, corresponding to damage limitation, significant damage, and near collapse. The described methodology is used to estimate seismic risk in terms of damage and the index of seismic risk for selected return periods. The general methodology has allowed a full seismic vulnerability assessment of the whole Croatian settlement of Kaštel Kambelovac.