Observational failure analysis of precast buildings after the 2012 Emilia earthquakes

The 2012 Emilia (Italy) earthquakes struck a highly industrialized area including several thousands of industrial prefabricated buildings. Due to the lack of specific design and detailing for earthquake resistance, precast reinforced concrete (RC) buildings suffered from severe damages and even partial or total collapses in many cases. The present study reports a data inventory of damages from field survey on prefabricated buildings. The damage database concerns more than 1400 buildings (about 30% of the total precast building stock in the struck region). Making use of the available shakemaps of the two mainshocks, damage distributions were related with distance from the nearest epicentre and corresponding Pseudo-Spectral Acceleration for a period of 1 second (PSA at 1 s). It was found that about 90% of the severely damaged to collapsed buildings included into the database stay within 16 km from the epicentre and experienced a PSA larger than 0.12g. Moreover, 90% of slightly to moderately damaged buildings are located at less than 25 km from the epicentre and were affected by a PSA larger than 0.06g. Nevertheless, the undamaged buildings examined are almost uniformly distributed over the struck region and 10% of them suffered a PSA not lower than 0.19g. The damage distributions in terms of the maximum experienced Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) show a sudden increase for PGA  0.28g. In this PGA interval, 442 buildings were collected in the database; 55% of them suffered severe damages up to collapse, 32% reported slight to moderate damages, whereas the remaining 13% resulted undamaged.