Seismic risk of schools at a regional scale: the ASSESS project

In a seismic territory, one of the concerns of the public administrators is to guarantee people safety in case of an earthquake occurrence, mainly in public facilities and in particular in school buildings. Public administrations are facing a complex problem and they often need to answer the following questions: what school must be adequate first? Why? What typologies of intervention are necessary? What level of safety is possible to reach? What is the cost of retrofitting? How many interventions can be managed with the available resources? How should be managed the most critical cases? How should be communicated to people the level of risk? These questions point out that the definition of a rational and effective strategy for the mitigation of seismic risk implies the necessity to know the level of risk and the criticalities together with the required countermeasures and their costs. All this knowledge permits to carry out an evaluation of the needed economical effort in terms of necessary global financial amount and, consequently, the definition of the practicable strategies for risk mitigation. This problem has been addressed in the ASSESS (Analysis of the Seismic ScEnarios of the School buildings for a definition of retrofitting priorities for Seismic risk reduction) project, aimed at knowing the seismic risk of the schools of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, in north-eastern Italy, for preventive purposes. Specific decision-making supports have been defined in order to facilitate public administrators in the management of rational seismic risk mitigation strategies.