Seismic Vulnerability and Property Losses to the Portuguese Industrial Steel Building Stock

José Miguel Castro,Miguel Araújo,Mário Marques

doi:10.24840/2183-6493_002.003_0005

Abstract

Industry plays a key role in the economy of a country, people welfare and socio-economic resilience to natural disasters. Earthquakes are known to have damaging impacts on industrial property and activity, oftentimes resulting in costly structural and non-structural losses to industrial buildings, business closure, production failure and job losses. Notwithstanding this fact, the industrial building stock has been continuously excluded from seismic risk models developed for Portugal as it is usually assumed that industrial buildings are expected to withstand strong earthquakes due to their lightweight and design governed by wind loads. The aim of this paper is thus to give a first contribution to the assessment of the seismic vulnerability and property losses of the existing Portuguese industrial steel building stock. Both losses to structural and non-structural components and industry-specific contents, such as production equipment and machinery, are taken into account. The expected direct industrial property losses for a probability of exceedance of 10 % in 50 years for mainland Portugal are herein estimated.

Highlights

Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, being located in a seismic-prone region just next to the border of the Eurasian plate
The direct industrial property losses for a probability of exceedance of 10% in 50 years were quantified at a national scale for Mainland Portugal using a web-based platform for seismic loss estimation recently developed at the University of Porto under the FCT-nationally founded PRISE project, which relies on the open-source OpenQuake engine (Silva et al, 2014)
This paper has investigated the seismic vulnerability and property losses to the Portuguese industrial steel building stock

Summary

Introduction

Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, being located in a seismic-prone region just next to the border of the Eurasian plate. A recent comprehensive study conducted by Silva et al (2015) evidenced some alarming scenarios, wherein a future event with a return period of 475 years, i.e., probability of exceedance of 10 % in 50 years, was shown to produce mean economic losses to the current residential building stock of approximately 30% of the national GDP, without accounting for non-structural components and building contents. This increasing awareness has been recently strengthened by a Parliament Resolution on seismic risk reduction and new legislation on Critical Infrastructure Protection (Lopes et al, 2012). The direct industrial property losses for a probability of exceedance of 10% in 50 years were quantified at a national scale for Mainland Portugal using a web-based platform for seismic loss estimation recently developed at the University of Porto under the FCT-nationally founded PRISE project, which relies on the open-source OpenQuake engine (Silva et al, 2014)

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion