Earthquake scenarios for Switzerland - Vulnerability of existing structures

Summary

The goal of the research project Earthquake Scenarios for Switzerland is to improve the assessment of seismic hazard, to investigate the vulnerability of the build environment and to elaborate risk scenarios. The study will focus on certain target areas in the region of Basel and in the Valais.
As one of the research lines of the Earthquake Scenarios project, the vulnerability investigations consist of a comprehensive inventory of buildings and engineering works in the selected target areas. The buildings and engineering works will be classified into vulnerabilty categories. Vulnerability functions describing the expected damage based on spectral accelerations will be established for the categories of the inventory.
Inventory and vulnerability functions will be incorporated in a Geographical Information System (GIS) together with the results from regional seismic hazard and local site effect studies, the other research lines of the Earthquake Scenarios project. The final step consists in the evaluation of the probabilistic seismic risk for selected target areas. It is also planned to calculate the deterministic risk for certain earthquake scenarios like the repetiton of the Basel earthquake of 1356 or of other known historical earthquakes.

Staff

Prof. Dr. Hugo Bachmann (Guideance)
Dr. Kerstin Lang
Dr. Thomas Wenk