Risk Assessment of Public Schools and Prioritization Strategy for Risk Mitigation

Abstract eng:
Seismic vulnerability of schools buildings have been recognized as one critical aspect in recent earthquakes. The situation is more dramatic in developing countries in which self-construction is a common practice, low quality materials are commonly used and lack of control is very common, especially in geographically remote areas. Governments, non-governmental organizations and specialist communities are interested in improving earthquake school safety. Seismic risk mitigation programs are developed with the main objective of reducing the risk of death or injuries in the educational sector and improve the expected behavior of the infrastructure during earthquakes. Known difficulties for this purposes are the availability of information, the lack of reliable vulnerability assessment tools and the need of a relatively simple prioritization strategy once an intervention plan is defined. The poorly and unreliable information available for school buildings and the high uncertainties in the data collected aggravates the problem. The definition of a procedure to decide the optimum type of intervention according to the vulnerability assessment is also a problem for developing such programs. This paper presents a methodological approach for the seismic risk mitigation in school infrastructure and the subsequent definition of the prioritization strategy for the implementation phase. Vulnerability assessment requires the definition and characterization of sets of buildings with similar seismic response in the entire school infrastructure portfolio. Probabilistic seismic risk assessment in terms of economic losses is used to quantify the annual expected losses for each school building and the entire portfolio. After this, the average annual loss (AAL) is defined as the main parameter for the prioritization criteria at school facility level. Total cost of intervention is calculated depending on the intervention type selected. Cumulative average annual loss curves (CAAL) are proposed for the definition of regional plans which permits the quantification of the target number of schools facilities for intervention activities depending on the availability of economic resources by regions. The definition of different implementation periods and the determination of the impact in terms of number of schools intervened, number of students benefitted and effective risk reduction at each stage of the program is possible according to this methodology. The applicability and effectiveness of the methodological proposal is validated through the case study of the school infrastructure in Lima-Peru.

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