The L’Aquila earthquake—A view of site effects and building behavior from temporary networks

Abstract

The idea of this Special Issue comes from a “joint venture” of research groups from several Italian and European Institutions (Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia and University of Basilicata, Italy; GeoForschungsZentrum-GFZ, Germany; CETE Mediterranee—LRPC Nice and OCA-UMR Geoazur, France) which carried out a large seismic survey for site effect estimation in the wide area hit by the 2009 L’Aquila, Italy, earthquake (Fig. 1). The Mw 6.3 mainshock of April 6th, 2009, represented the most damaging event in Italy since the 1980 Irpinia earthquake (Mw 6.9). Several large aftershocks (Mw > 5) and thousands of smaller events occurred in the following months and the deployment of different rapid response seismic networks from Italy, France and Germany allowed the scientific community to collect a very large and high quality data set, probably the largest ever acquired during a normal fault seismic sequence (Marzorati et al. 2011). Among many scientific issues, the L’Aquila earthquake seismic sequence represented a laboratory to better understand the occurrence of site effects in intra-mountain regions and their influence on damage distribution for traditional dwellings and recent residential reinforced concrete buildings (D’Ayala and Dolce 2011). The macroseismic survey (Galli and Camassi 2009) indicates that the strongest damages were observed in the city of L’Aquila and in the villages to the SE, in agreement with the rupture propagation pattern toward up-dip and SE (Cirella et al. 2009) and according to the orientation of the Aterno River Valley. In particular, sixteen localities including L’Aquila downtown, on the hanging-wall side of the