Probabilistic Assessment of Seismic Risk of Dwelling Buildings of Barcelona. Implication for the City Resilience

The knowledge of seismic risk of buildings can contribute to increase the resilience of cities. In the present work a new assessment of the seismic risk of dwelling buildings of Barcelona was done. This assessment was performed according to a probabilistic methodology, which is summarized in the following steps: (1) performing a probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) to obtain exceedance rates of macroseismic intensities; (2) performing a probabilistic seismic vulnerability assessment (PSVA) of each building in order to determine probability density functions that describe the variation of a vulnerability index; and (3) performing a probabilistic seismic risk assessment (PSRA) to generate seismic risk curves in terms of frequencies of exceedance of damage states. In the present work 69,982 dwelling buildings of Barcelona were assessed. According to the results the percentage of dwelling buildings of Barcelona that have a probability equal or greater than 1% of suffer partial collapse in the next 50 years is a value between 0% and 34.29%. A value of 0% corresponds to the results of seismic risk obtained for the case where regional vulnerability modifiers were not considered during the procedure to assess the seismic vulnerability of buildings and 34.29% correspond to the case where regional vulnerability modifiers were considered. For the same two options, the losses due to the physical damage of the dwelling buildings of Barcelona assessed for an exposure time of 50 years, could vary from 807.3 to 1739.4 millions of euros, respectively. Finally, possible uses of the seismic risk results computed in the present work are mentioned.