Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of School Buildings in Seismic Zone 4 of Pakistan

Abstract

Thick population density and its escalation propensity in seismically active regions of Pakistan has raised sincere concerns about the performance of building stock whose suboptimal performance and complete collapses led to a colossal number of casualties during the past earthquakes. The current research is inspired by the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 which consumed more than 80,000 lives, out of which, approximately 19,000 were children due to wide spread collapse of school buildings. A new database for existing reinforced concrete (RC) school buildings in seismic zone 4 of Pakistan has been developed using the surveyed information and presented briefly. The paper presents the statistics of the data collected through field surveys and professional interviews. It was found that the infrastructural authorities in the considered region developed some specific designs for school buildings, with varying architectural and structural configurations, which were eventually replicated throughout the area. In the current study, almost 2500 schools were surveyed for identifying versatile architectural and structural configurations, and subsequently, 19 different types had been identified, which were eventually used as representative stock for the schools in seismic zone 4 of Pakistan, Muzaffarabad district. The results of the study yield the brief of the collected data from the field and a consolidated methodology for establishing the analytical fragility relationships for one of the 19 structural configurations of the school buildings. A sample building from the collected data has been selected by considering the maximum number of students, and afterwards, the vulnerability is assessed by employing incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) which constitutes the presented methodology. Finally, the fragility curves are developed and presented for the said building type. The derived analytical fragility curves for the considered building type indicate its structural vulnerability and as a whole represent its satisfactory behavior. The vulnerability assessment process and the fragility development are described in an easy manner so that the domestic practicing engineers can readily become able to extend the application towards other school buildings in the region. The developed relationships can be employed for rational decision making so that essential disaster preparedness can be carried out by identifying any need for structural strengthening and interventions.

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“…With reference to the incremental dynamic analysis method in seismic vulnerability analysis [25], the range of the explosion distance R is set from 6 m to 1 m, and the calculation is performed at an interval of 0.02 m.…”

A Resilience-Based Model for the Seismic Assessment of the Functionality of Road Networks Affected by Bridge Damage and Restoration

“…In studies focusing on the seismic response of a community of people, whose functions are operatively possible due to the presence of the built environment, the concept of resilience, as an indicator able to express the residual functionality of a society in its effort to recover after a seismic event, has emerged [6][7][8][9].…”

Multi-Criteria Assessment of the Seismic Vulnerability of School Units in Vaslui City, Romania

“…Previous studies of seismic vulnerability of educational institutions follow one of two directions (i) evaluating the damages determined by specific earthquakes [4], [5]; or (ii) estimating the possible damages that may be caused by a future seismic event [6]- [15]. Also, there is an extended scientific literature volume regarding the matter of retrofitting of school buildings [16]- [22].…”

“…Some of the previous studies use methodologies adapted to fit the evaluation of seismic vulnerability of school buildings made out of a specific construction material [6], [10], [11], while others assess prototypes of school [5], [13], [14], [18]. For many of the mentioned papers, the key element is represented by fragility curves [6], [12], [15], [18] and the number of multicriteria-based approaches to the matter is rather low [23].…”