Earthquake risk and risk assessment.

The risk seems to have a leading role and generalized attention by the citizens only

during the emergency.

In order to understand what it means, it is necessary to understand what is

"Disaster Risk", this is the basis of all measures for disaster risk reduction. Earthquakes

are the largest number of damages that occur in the course of humanity, with an average

of more than 25,000 deaths per year, causing liquefaction, landslides, fires and tsunamis

that would lead to a much higher level of damages and losses. The earthquake risk

assessment is the first step to support decisions and actions to reduce potential losses.

Risk measures can help decision making to implement risk reduction measures that can

include emergency response plans, the application of design codes, the creation of

adaptation campaigns and the development of insurance groups.

Earthquakes have caused catastrophic damage throughout populated areas

throughout history. Nowadays, the urbanized environment and the populations are even

larger and, therefore, their exposure to the dangers of seismic activity is also greater.

However, a well-founded knowledge of the possible risks allows to implement effective

mitigation strategies. The more you know about the possible consequences of an

earthquake in buildings and infrastructure, the better prepared you will be for the next

one. A European study developed several important seismic risk assessment tools.

For the evaluation of the seismic risk of the buildings, the evaluation of the seismic

threat must be anticipated. The seismic threat is made at the surface level of the land in

the city and additionally the estimation of the seismic vulnerability associated with

predominant construction types.

Finally, seismic vulnerability is of utmost importance because it is the relationship

between seismic intensity and damage level. It can be measured with spectral
acceleration. The damage level can be estimated by taking the mezzanine drift as a

reference parameter, which is calculated as the relative displacement between two

contiguous levels, divided by the height of the floor. The expression used to determine

the distortion between floors includes the relationship between the maximum lateral

displacement at the upper level of the structure and the spectral shift, for a linear

behavior model; the relationship between the maximum distortion of the mezzanine and

the overall distortion of the structure; the relationship between the lateral displacement

of the inelastic behavior model and the maximum displacement of the linear elastic

model; and factors that depend on the location of the structure, the structural type, the

type of soil and the year of construction, among others.