A Prioritization Scheme for Seismic Intervention in School Buildings in Italy

A seismic rehabilitation program is being implemented to address the vulnerability of a large proportion of Italian building stock. A risk-management framework, initially only for Italian school buildings, has been developed to assign priorities for the rehabilitation, and to give timescales within which retrofit or demolition must take place. Since it is not practical to carry out detailed assessment for around 60,000 Italian schools, the framework is a multiple-level procedure that aims to identify the highest-risk buildings based on filters of increasing detail, and reduces the size of the building inventory at each step. Finally, priorities and timescales are assigned based on vulnerability, seismic hazard, and building occupancy, within a general framework with parameters that must be assigned by the relevant authorities. The methodology is transparent, technically based, and flexible enough to be adapted for other building types or regions.