Building exposure and vulnerability models for seismic risk assessment have been the focus of a number of European projects in recent years, but there has never been a concerted effort among the research community to produce a uniform European risk model. The European Commission’s Horizon 2020 SERA project has a work package that is dedicated to that objective, through the development of an exposure model, an associated set of fragility/vulnerability models, and a database of socioeconomic indicators in order to calculate probabilistic integrated seismic risk at a European scale. This article provides details of the development of the first versions of the European exposure model that describe the distribution of the main residential, industrial and commercial building classes across all countries in Europe, as well as their occupants and replacement costs. The v0.1 of the European exposure model has been integrated within the Global Earthquake Model’s global exposure and risk maps. Preliminary analyses using the model show that almost 35% of the residential population in Europe is exposed to a 475-year return period peak ground acceleration (PGA) hazard of at least 0.1 g, thus highlighting the importance of European seismic risk modeling and mitigation.
Recent natural disasters that seriously affected critical infrastructure (CI) with significant socioeconomic losses and impact revealed the need for the development of reliable methodologies for vulnerability and risk assessment. In this paper, a risk-based multi-level stress test method that has been recently proposed, aimed at enhancing procedures for evaluation of the risk of critical non-nuclear infrastructure systems against natural hazards, is specified and applied to six key representative CIs in Europe, exposed to variant hazards. The following CIs are considered: an oil refinery and petrochemical plant in Milazzo, Italy, a conceptual alpine earth-fill dam in Switzerland, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in Turkey, part of the Gasunie national gas storage and distribution network in the Netherlands, the port infrastructure of Thessaloniki, Greece, and an industrial district in the region of Tuscany, Italy. The six case studies are presented following the workflow of the stress test framework comprised of four phases: pre-assessment phase, assessment phase, decision phase and report phase. First, the goals, the method, the time frame and the appropriate stress test level to apply are defined. Then, the stress test is performed at component and system levels and the outcomes are checked and compared to risk acceptance criteria. A stress test grade is assigned, and the global outcome is determined by employing a grading system. Finally, critical components and events and risk mitigation strategies are formulated and reported to stakeholders and authorities.
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