Steps in Seismic Risk Mapping for Romania Capital City

Abstract

Bucharest, capital of Romania, is one of the most seismically vulnerable cities in Europe. The earthquakes affecting the city have their origin in the Vrancea intermediate-depth source. In the last century, major earthquakes (November 10, 1940, Mw = 7.7; March 4, 1977, Mw = 7.4; August 30, 1986, Mw = 7.1; May 30, 1990, Mw = 6.9) produced significant effects for this area. This study’s objective is to highlight the seismic risk of Bucharest nowadays by estimating the possible building and human losses, for relevant scenarios—based on real data and neodeterministic approach. The building loss estimates were obtained through the Improved Displacement Coefficient Analytical Method. In order to provide a balanced input that can also reflect different damage states in the risk analysis, for the hazard data we used real data from seismic stations for August 30, 1986 and May 30, 1990 earthquakes and microzonation map for the maximum possible earthquake that can be produced in Vrancea intermediate-depth source ($\mathrm{{M}}_\mathrm{{w}}$ = 7.8 and depth 150 km). The spectral content was used for peak ground acceleration (PGA) and spectral acceleration at 0.3 and 1 seconds. For the vulnerability assessment, data obtained from the “Danube Cross-Border system for Earthquakes Alert” (DACEA) Project and a database with classification of the buildings in 1999 were used. The analysis is performed at sector level (6 in total). We computed the probability of damage for the buildings and human casualties in terms of different injury types with SELENA Software.

Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.