Preface to the special issue “Strategic applications of real-time risk mitigation strategies and tools: case studies and lessons learned in REAKT”

Project REAKT (Strategies and Tools for Real-Time Earthquake Risk Reduction, http:// www.reaktproject.eu) was funded in 2011 within the 7th Framework Programme (contract number 282862) of the European Commission. The project concluded at the end of 2014, after 40 months. The main goal of REAKT was to investigate the current limits and improve the efficiency of real-time earthquake risk mitigation methods and their capability of protecting critical structures, infrastructures and the population. To this aim, REAKT gathered the main European institutions and research groups, in addition to major nonEuropean ones, active on different aspects of earthquake early warning (EEW) operational earthquake forecasting (OEF) and real-time structural health monitoring (SHM). One of the work packages of the project, namely ‘‘WP7—Strategic Applications and Capacity Building’’, was devoted to applying and optimising the performance of real-time seismology methods to a variety of critical structures and infrastructures in Europe and worldwide. The strategic applications included: (1) nuclear (Switzerland), hydroelectric (Iceland) and coal (Portugal) power plants; (2) cable stayed (Greece) and suspension bridges (Turkey); (3) electric power (Iceland) and gas distribution (Portugal, Turkey) networks; (4) oil refineries (Portugal); (5) industrial and touristic harbours (Greece, Portugal); vi) railways (Italy); (6) public schools (Italy) and hospitals (Greece). The applications were segregated into feasibility studies, prototype implementation and operational implementation efforts, based on the level of maturity expected to be reached by each application within the project timeline. Important throughout REAKT was the cooperation of academic experts and non-academic (private, public, industrial) end-users/stakeholders aimed at defining work plans for feasibility studies and implementation processes. End-

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