A QGIS Plugin for the Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Urban Centers: Application to the City of Popoli in Abruzzo (Italy)

Abstract

Seismic vulnerability assessment of buildings is a process of paramount importance for identifying those areas in a city demanding higher attention with respect to potential earthquake attacks. Methods for evaluating seismic vulnerability require a more or less accurate survey of the buildings geometrical and mechanical features, as well as of the structural systems, in order to identify the vulnerability classes to which they belong. However, even for relatively small-sized cities, the task of deriving vulnerability maps may be truly time consuming. Therefore, the development of automatic tools for mapping vulnerabilities of urban areas is necessary to reduce this effort significantly. QGIS (www.qgis.org) is a free open source software which includes a large number of peculiar packages, that make it a powerful tool and that can be well integrated or adapted with new components or plugins. In this paper, a plugin for assisting in the generation of vulnerability maps of an urban area is shown. The presented QGIS tool is applied to a case study, the historic city centre of Popoli, in the Abruzzi region (Central Italy), which belongs to a relevant earthquake-prone area and that was affected by two major seismic sequences in 2009 and in 2016-2017. Potential damage scenarios are presented and discussed, deriving useful information that could be applied in risk mitigation strategies.

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