A Simplified Procedure for Seismic Risk Assessment of Existing Italian School Buildings

Seismic risk assessment of school building heritage is a relevant topic in Italy, as most of them were built several years ago and were not designed using anti-seismic criteria. In addition, a large portion of existing school structures is characterized by a bad state of conservation, mainly due to the lack of maintenance and structure deterioration. Seismic risk evaluation of these buildings has to take into account the combination of seismic hazard, structural vulnerability and exposure considering the mainly characteristics. In the last decades, to this aim, many methods have been introduced, which differ from each other by the refinement of the applied methodology of analysis. At national level, in order to provide a tool to solve this problem, a specific database called “Sistema Nazionale delle Anagrafi dell’Edilizia Scolastica (SNAES)”, which consists of a census of the entire school building heritage, has been developed. Such database contains many parameters related to the consistency, degradation state and functionality. In this paper, starting from the existing methods and considering the parameters and the information actually present in the school building files of SNAES, a simplified and fast methodology for assessing the seismic risk of both masonry and reinforced concrete schools is provided. This procedure can be applied to a large number of structures and in this paper it is analyzed with reference to a sample of school buildings located in the Caserta Province.