Probabilistic assessment of the seismic risk of buildings in urban areas

Abstract

A probabilistic methodology (LM1_P) based on the LM1 method of the Risk-UE project, is applied to estimate the seismic risk of Barcelona. This simplified methodology allows considering numerous uncertainties that are inherent to the seismic risk estimations. In order to estimate the seismic risk of 59,804 buildings of Barcelona, the seismic vulnerability of these buildings and the seismic hazard of Barcelona were estimated. The seismic hazard results are expressed in terms of exceedance rate of intensity parameters and the seismic vulnerability results are expressed in terms of probability density functions that describe the variation of a vulnerability index. Finally, the seismic risk results are expressed in terms of annual probability of occurrence of different damage states. According to the results, a high percentage of the buildings of Barcelona have a high seismic vulnerability, and a considerable part of them have a seismic risk between moderate and high.