DEFINITION OF A PRIORITISATION PROCEDURE FOR STRUCTURAL RETROFITTING OF ITALIAN SCHOOL BUILDINGS

Most of the Italian school buildings were not designed according to seismic criteria and, therefore, they are vulnerable from a seismic point of view. A clear proof of this was the catastrophic collapse of the school at San Giuliano during the October 2002 earthquake: thirty people death, twenty seven of whom were young students and one their teacher. After this seismic event, the process for identifying the most seismic vulnerable school buildings was started in Italy, with the final aim of improving their strength. Furthermore, several school buildings, mainly located in the historical centre of the town, were damaged during the recent seismic event of L'Aquila (April 6, 2009), as reported by Salvatore et al. (1). The pro- posed research work was driven by the idea of defining a methodology that implements differ- ent analysis phases with an increasing level of detail such that the number of buildings analysed decreases at each phase since only the buildings most at seismic risk are considered. The implemented procedure follows some well known works published in literature (2, 3). The definition of a prioritisation scheme of intervention is strictly due to the high number of school buildings (almost 50000) that cannot be deeply analysed considering the limited avail- able resources. The developed tool and procedure can be very helpful since they provide in- formation extremely important for civil protection actions.