S. Colonna¹, S. Imperatore¹, and B. Ferracuti¹
1)  Niccolò Cusano University- Department of Engineering
Via Don Carlo Gnocchi, 3
{silvia.colonna, stefania.imperatore, barbara.ferracuti}@unicusano.it

Keywords: Masonry Churches; seismic behavior; vulnerability assessment, damage index.

Abstract. The 2016 Central-Italy Earthquake sequence caused significant losses in terms of Cultural Heritage: the almost complete destruction of some historical towns (e.g. Amatrice, Accumoli, and Norcia) and the collapse of more than 300 buildings of high cultural-historical interest. In the post-emergency management, according to the Civil Protection Department and the Italian Cultural Heritage Bureau, the authors inspected 35 churches as technical experts of the ReLUIS Consortium, in order to evaluate the after-shock usability. With this purpose, the Church Damage Form adopted by the Italian Standard has been filled and the Damage Index calculated. The post-seismic damage assessment is a fundamental step in order to predict future damage in case of seismic events for given building typologies or churches. Lagomarsino and Podestà collected data from past earthquakes to calibrate a relationship between churches vulnerability index, seismic hazard and damage.
In the present paper, the damage observed during the surveys is described and the corresponding Damage Index critically analyzed. Moreover, in order to evaluate the applicability of the formulation proposed by Lagomarsino and Podestà, the Expected Damage is computed as function of the Church Vulnerability Index and the Macroseismic Intensity (IMCS).Peak Ground Motion based formulations are proposed, whose goal consists on the uncertainty decrease of the seismic damage prediction on Churches, in order to obtain more realistic results.