A PREDICTIVE MODEL FOR THE SEISMIC SAFETY ASSESSMENT OF SCHOOL MASONRY BUILDINGS

In recent years, the seismic safety assessment of school buildings has become a strategic topic for the Italian community. In fact, the dramatic collapse of the San Giuliano di Puglia school building due to the Molise earthquake (MI 5.4) in 2002 highlighted the urgent need to work out a national strategic plan of intervention in order to avoid that any further fatal event occur in the future. Moving from the safety assessment carried out on 10 masonry buildings of the Ferrara district, the authors developed a new predictive model for the seismic safety assessment of school masonry buildings. Making use of very simple information like plant geometry, material quality, in plane floor stiffness, masonry wall density in both of the principal directions and so on, this model works out a vulnerability factor for each considered building. The proposed model is calibrated on the pushover analysis results performed by means of commercial codes. This model is very simple to use and its employment allows to draw a seismic risk classification of a great number of buildings with a small computational effort and minimum costs.