Author(s)

P. Kapetana & S. Dritsos

Abstract

Recently, several pre-earthquake screening methods have been developed in order to rapidly evaluate the vulnerability profile of the existing building stock, which has been constructed before or after the adoption and enforcement of seismic codes. The objective of these methods is to identify, inventory and rank all high-risk buildings in a specified region so that a strategy of priority based interventions to buildings can be formed. Major parameters that have affects on the seismic risk are the seismicity of the location, vulnerability and importance of the building structure. The most known rapid visual screening methods have been developed in countries of high seismic risk such as the USA, Greece, New Zealand, India and Canada and they are briefly described in this paper. Furthermore, these methods are applied to a sample of 456 reinforced concrete buildings, located in Athens, whose structural characteristics and levels of damage by the 1999 Athens earthquake are known. In particular, 93 buildings collapsed, 201 sustained severe damage, 69 moderate and 93 buildings sustained light damage. By the methods’ implementation, eight different scores have been determined for each building, according to the scoring systems of the applied methods. The results of those applications are used to evaluate the methods’ reliability in identifying potentially seismically hazardous reinforced concrete buildings. The obtained results indicate that the implementation of the Greek method results in the most reasonable connection between damage severity and structural scores for all levels of damage, while the Greek method is represented to be the most efficient in terms of both predicting the damage level and leading to the reliable formation of a high-priority set of buildings. Keywords: pre-earthquake, rapid, visual, screening, seismic, vulnerability, assessment, building.

Keywords

pre-earthquake, rapid, visual, screening, seismic, vulnerability, assessment, building.