Structural Risk Assessment of Existing Road Bridges According to Italian Guidelines Based on a Territorial Case Study

The paper deals with the preservation of Italian bridge assets, which may suffer structural deficiencies mainly due to the state of conservation, as well as to outdated adopted design criteria. A systematic procedure aimed at assessing the structural risk affecting existing bridges has been recently introduced by the “Italian Guidelines for classifying, managing the risk, assessing the structural safety and monitoring existing bridges”. The procedure at issue entails the assessment of hazard, vulnerability and exposure based on typological data, which are combined in order to obtain an attention class in order to define the future measures to be adopted. In this paper, the application of such a procedure on a sample of 75 bridges of Caserta, Italy, is presented and the main results are shown. In the whole, the study confirms the necessity to adopt far-sighting and smart policies by handling bodies. On the other hand, some critical aspects in relation to possible missing data in existing censuses are addressed and possible solutions and alternative methods are discussed.