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

Abstract

Thick population density and it sescalation propensity in seismically activeregions of Pakistan hasraised since reconcerns 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 80,000lives,outofwhich,approximately19,000werechildrenduetowidespreadcollapseofschoolbuildings.Anewdatabasefor 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,19differenttypeshadbeenidentified,whichwereeventuallyusedasrepresentativestockfortheschoolsinseismic 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 schoolbuildings.Asamplebuildingfromthecollecteddatahasbeenselectedbyconsideringthemaximumnumberofstudents, 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 curvesfortheconsideredbuildingtypeindicateitsstructuralvulnerabilityandasawholerepresentitssatisfactorybehavior.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 relationshipscanbeemployedforrationaldecisionmakingsothatessentialdisasterpreparednesscanbecarriedoutbyidentifying any need for structural strengthening and interventions.