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Earthquake early warning feasibility in the Campania region (southern Italy) and demonstration system for public school buildings

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Abstract

We present the results of a feasibility study of an earthquake early warning system (EEWS) for the Campania region (southern Italy) using schools as specific targets. The study considered the seismogenic zones as sources of potential earthquakes for the area, the Italian accelerometric network as the recording network for seismic event occurrence, and the performances of the software platform PRESToPlus for data analysis and processing. We analyze the distribution of lead-times for all possible threatening seismic sources for each municipality in the region under study by extracting the lead-time value corresponding to the 5th, 10th and 25th percentiles of the distributions. We discuss the results for the 5th percentile in order to analyze the worst-case scenario: in the case of a single site, the lead-time is expected to be larger than this value in the 95 % of the cases. Since the population distribution in Campania is uneven and most of the people live nearby the coast, whilst the most destructive earthquakes occur along the Apennine chain, we can conclude that an efficient EEWS can allow most of the schools in the area to undertake some mitigating actions. The testing of the EEWS was carried out in the high school ITIS ‘E. Majorana’, located at Somma Vesuviana, about 80 km from the seismogenic Irpinia region. For this purpose, the Sentinel, an actuator made up of low-cost hardware (i.e., Arduino®), was developed in close cooperation with students and teachers of the school to receive alert messages from the PRESToPlus platform and warn the school users in case of a seismic event. The EEWS and the Sentinel were successfully tested during some blind drills performed during normal school activities.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Chief Editor A. Ansal, the Guest Editor C. Cauzzi, K. Fleming and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions that allowed us to significantly improve the manuscript content and form. The work was supported by the project REAKT, Strategies and Tools for Real Time Earthquake Risk Reduction, funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) under the Grant Agreement 282862. The authors wish to thank the staff and students of the ITIS ‘E. Majorana’ for their effective collaboration during all phases of the project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Fisica E. Pancini, Università degli Studi Federico II di Napoli, Complesso Universitario di Monte S. Angelo, Edificio 6, Via Cintia, 80126, Naples, Italy

    Antonio Emolo, Matteo Picozzi, Gaetano Festa, Simona Colombelli, Alessandro Caruso, Aldo Zollo & Piero Brondi

  2. AMRA Scarl, Via Nuova Agnano 11, 80125, Naples, Italy

    Claudio Martino & Luca Elia

  3. ITIS E. Majorana, Via San Sossio 7, 80049, Somma Vesuviana, NA, Italy

    Nicola Miranda

Authors
  1. Antonio Emolo
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  2. Matteo Picozzi
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  3. Gaetano Festa
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  4. Claudio Martino
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  5. Simona Colombelli
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  6. Alessandro Caruso
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  7. Luca Elia
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  8. Aldo Zollo
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  9. Piero Brondi
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  10. Nicola Miranda
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Correspondence to Antonio Emolo.

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Emolo, A., Picozzi, M., Festa, G. et al. Earthquake early warning feasibility in the Campania region (southern Italy) and demonstration system for public school buildings. Bull Earthquake Eng 14, 2513–2529 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-016-9865-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-016-9865-z

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