Assessment of the seismic safety of school buildings in Mexico: A first look

Applied sciences, 2022

Featured Application: Based on the risk estimates obtained in this study, the Lisbon City Council defined short-and medium-term risk mitigation plans, starting with a detailed inspection and assessment of the more vulnerable school buildings, in order to mitigate seismic risk on the city council-managed public schools.

Buildings

The current study is based on the analysis and adaptation of a Federal Emergency Management Agency guide, FEMA P-1000, from the USA to improve school safety against natural hazards by applying the guide to the infrastructure of Ecuadorian schools, focusing primarily on seismic risk. By considering the technical foundations of structuring and managing disasters in buildings for school use, society will be provided with a practical procedure to recognize those aspects that need immediate attention as part of proper risk management. Here, a variety of parameters are involved in the proposed methodology of the given guide from FEMA combined with the national construction standards and regulations. The characteristics of nearby geological faults and structural and nonstructural vulnerability levels, amongst others, were also considered to allow for a detailed evaluation and a subsequent seismic risk categorization. Finally, the global risk is determined for the studied institutions of Sa...

2016

The capital of Mendoza and the surrounding departments are located in the area of the most seismic vulnerability in Argentina. In spite of having suffered destructive earthquakes, the reconstruction was made in the same affected area of the historical earthquake of 1861, or very near, as well as were the educational buildings, having nowadays more than 500 buildings for that purpose. Many of them are from times when no seismic resistance regulations were required. And other ones have been built under regulations that are different from the current ones. The new regulations have achieved a great advance in the structural and not structural design of the buildings, and this is a tool which gives us a starting point to value what has been done in the constructions made in different stages of our history. The lack of structural adaptation of these buildings can generate their collapse and consequently the loss of their occupant’s lives, causing a great social and economic impact in the ...

Buildings, 2023

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, 2015

The majority of structures in seismic-prone areas worldwide are structures that have been designed either without seismic design considerations, or using codes of practice that are seriously inadequate in the light of current seismic design principles. In Cyprus, after a series of earthquakes that occurred between 1995 and 1999, it was decided to carry out an unprecedented internationally seismic retrofitting of all school buildings, taking into account the sensitivity of the society towards these structures. In this paper representative school buildings are analysed in both their pristine condition and after applying retrofitting schemes typical of those implemented in the aforementioned large-scale strengthening programme. Non-linear analysis is conducted on calibrated analytical models of the selected buildings and fragility curves are derived for typical reinforced concrete and unreinforced masonry structures. These curves are then used to carry out a feasibility study, including both benefit-cost and life-cycle analysis, and evaluate the effectiveness of the strengthening programme.

Earthquake Spectra, 2004

The authors inspected approximately 300 primary and secondary schools in 87 municipalities of Molise. About 40% were masonry structures, 40% were reinforced concrete (RC) frame structures, and the remaining 20% were a variety of structures. Almost all of them were built without seismic criteria and most had no more than three stories. In this paper we compare the distribution of the damage with the vulnerability classes. The collapses in San Giuliano di Puglia highlight the comparative vulnerabilities related to structural types, construction phases, and location.

Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, 2018

Different methods and procedures have been developed to define prioritisation strategies of retrofit interventions aimed at reducing the seismic risk of school buildings on a large territorial scale. However, these approaches fail to demonstrate how risk analysis has been used successfully to quantitatively assess and select the optimal risk management decision. This article proposes innovative and useful metrics to measure the potential costs and benefits related to the prioritisation of retrofit intervention and the resilience of the analysed school system by directly integrating engineering, organisational, socio-economic and political aspects in the realm of seismic resilience assessment. Based on probabilistic risk assessments considering the new vulnerability of the prioritised school buildings, these measures could predict the expected economic and functional losses associated with a disastrous seismic event, as well as the possible post-disaster recovery of the system. In order to help decision-makers in selecting the optimal mitigation strategy with a multidisciplinary and multidimensional perspective, different political scenarios, the relative prioritisations of interventions and their intervention options are also defined. The proposed framework is demonstrated in a complex case study of 1,825 public schools in the Lima metropolitan area, Peru. Policymakers, planners and engineering professionals could benefit from results.

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering

School buildings being a critical social infrastructure, assessment of their seismic behaviour is of utmost importance in ensuring safe schooling facilities in locations of high seismicity. This study presents two important aspects in analysing any existing building stock for seismic behaviour: the development of an appropriate taxonomy system and an appropriate analytical method to conduct fragility assessment. A detailed desk study of existing schools’ databases and tailored field investigation in Guwahati, Assam, situated in India’s highest seismic zone, reveal that the majority of school buildings can be categorised within the confined masonry (CM) typology. This study discusses first, the addition to the World Bank promoted Global Library of School Infrastructure taxonomy of the specific category relating to CM as to include the buildings under study, which are non-engineered CM buildings with flexible roofs. Identifying the density of confinement and quality of connections as ...

Regional seismic scenarios for Venezuelan school buildings are presented, based on a simplified methodology that develops fragility curves to characterize the seismic vulnerability, assess damages, losses and risk levels. The basic hypothesis is that buildings were designed and built in compliance with the seismic code in force at the time of the construction. Adopting a bilinear capacity curve five damage states were defined. The proposed methodology was calibrated by means of comparing the predicted damage with the observed damaged in an ensemble of school buildings affected by the 1997 Cariaco earthquake. A computational tool based on GIS to estimate damages and losses associated with a particular seismic event was developed, using modern seismic attenuation relationships. Seismic risk based on seismic hazard maps is also determined, which facilitates the task of prioritization for structural retrofitting decisions. The computational tool was applied to the evaluation of three regional scenarios.

Soft Computing

The island of Hispaniola, shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is located in a subduction zone between the North America plate and the Caribbean plate. In addition, there are 13 geological faults in the interior of the island, some of which have shown the potential to generate earthquakes of magnitude 7.5 and higher. Thus, the whole island is considered to be a high seismic risk region. In the past 100 years, several earthquakes have affected both parts of the island. In the case of the Dominican Republic, two earthquakes stand out: a magnitude 8.1 earthquake on August 4, 1946, north of the Samaná Province, which caused a tsunami, soil liquefaction, and the loss of about 100 lives, and a magnitude 6.5 earthquake on September 22, 2003, in the city of Puerto Plata, which caused significant damage for infrastructures. Among the observed effects, the partial and total collapse of several school buildings had a remarkable impact on local communities. In addition to the high seismic risk, a large part of the national infrastructure may exhibit high vulnerability to earthquakes because the seismic regulations had been the same for 32 years, namely from 1979 to 2011. During these three decades, thousands of structures were built nationwide, including essential facilities such as hospitals and schools. Considering that the current student population in public schools in the Dominican Republic is over 2 million, with the majority attending buildings that were designed with the 1979 seismic code and which proved to be highly vulnerable during the Puerto Plata earthquake, it is vital to take measures that reduce the risk and minimize potential earthquake damage to school buildings. In this context, the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC) has undertaken recently a project with the main objective to assess the seismic vulnerability of 22 schools located in the San Cristóbal Province, in the south of the Dominican Republic. The latter schools were all built prior to the adoption of the current updated seismic code. This paper presents the results of the assessment of the Fernando Cabral Ortega School. Although only the results of a single RC building are presented, the response of such structure can be considered representative of a portfolio of existing schools in Dominican Republic.