Fragility curves of Italian school buildings: derivation from L’Aquila 2009 earthquake damage via observational and heuristic approaches

Recent seismic events worldwide have demonstrated the high vulnerability of existing school buildings and the urgent need to have reliable tools for the rapid seismic performance assessment and damage and loss quantification. Indeed, the significant damage observed on structural and non-structural components may have a significant impact in terms of direct and indirect losses making critical the recovery of stricken communities. Although a significant amount of work has been done in developing fragility curves for the residential building stock, only few contributions clearly refer to school buildings that significantly differ in terms of the main characteristics from the residential ones. This research work proposes fragility curves for reinforced concrete and unreinforced masonry public school buildings typical of the Italian building stock, based on the damage observed in the aftermath of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. A comprehensive and unique database including data on damaged and undamaged school buildings (2037 records) in the Abruzzo region was built using data from four different sources. Due to limited amount of data, the fragility curves can be very sensitive to the method adopted for their derivation, thus three different approaches (i.e. empirical, empirical-binomial, heuristic) are considered in the paper and the results are compared. Finally, a direct comparison with fragility curves available in the literature for the Italian residential building stock is presented.