Abstract
In Italy, safety initiatives such as the so-called “building certification record-book” (in Italian: fascicolo di fabbricato) (cf Consiglio di Stato 2007) have been put off for an indefinite time: the “file” contained procedures compulsory for all public and private buildings (Cattanei et al. 2002). Thus, the improvement in safety check systems for already existing buildings has remained unapplied despite the needs of safety checks.
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- 1.
This was the result of two serious incidents: in Rome 16th December 1998, the collapse of a 5-storey residential building built in 1952–1954 (27 deaths); in Foggia, 11th November 1999, the collapse of another residential building, 6-storied, built between 1968 and 1971 (67 deaths).
- 2.
With Ordinance n° 1580, 27th March 2007, the Italian Council of State (Consiglio di Stato) gave its final decision on the “building certification record-book” set up by the Lazio Region and the Rome city council and already declared illegitimate by the Lazio TAR (Tribunale Amministrativo Regionale) with its sentence, 13th November 2006. The file had already become law (n° 31, 2002 by the Lazio Region). This act enabled local councils to set up a file on each building so as to define its conservation and maintenance condition and also its eventual risk situation. The Rome city council adopted the act (n° 27, 24th February 2004) also requiring geological, geotechnical and forestry details for the buildings’ land sites. The act also gave the technicians responsible for the inquiry the power to intervene, if necessary, with further inspections, if safety measures were thought necessary. The Confedilizia (one Italian Building Confederation) appealed against the “building certification record-book”, criticising, on the one hand, the onus on building owners in having to get skilled technicians who would decide whether to call in more experts, and on the other hand imposing on the owner the duty of gathering information concerning planning, urbanism, land registers, structure permits as well as historical, geological and environmental data. According to the judges the building file was “a waste of administration activity” and “an unnecessary doubling of obligations for owners” who “were being forced to supply the City council with information and detail (about their buildings) which have already been or can easily be acquired by public authorities”. The latter reference seems to be to geographical-environmental data not usually possessed by owners, but held by specific public offices.
- 3.
At Favara (Agrigento, Sicily), 23rd January 2010, a small block collapsed, smashing itself to pieces and killing two children. Note that rescuers had great problems as their vehicles were impeded in the very tight street network of the historical centre. At Afragola (Naples), 31st July 2010, another small dwelling, dilapidated outside but rebuilt inside, originally built in the 1940s but restructured in the 1970s, collapsed killing three. At Barletta, 3rd October 2011, in the historical centre, a small 3-storey building collapsed killing five of the workers in the knitwear factory inside the building—despite the many warnings from members of the public about the building’s deterioration.
- 4.
The UNI (Ente Nazionale Italiano di Unificazione, Italian National Agency for Unification) is a private non-profit-making association formed in 1921 and recognised by the Italian State and the European Union. The association studies, develops, approves and publishes voluntary technical norms (the so-called “UNI norms”) for all the industrial, commercial and territory sectors excepting electrical and electrotechnical ones. UNI members are companies, professionals individuals, associations, public bodies, research centres and teaching institutes. UNI represents Italy in the European and world standardisation organisations (CEN and ISO, “European Committee for Standardisation” and “International Organisation for Standardisation”). The aim of the UNI is to define technical norms in an effort to improve the efficiency of Italy’s social-economic system and contribute to technological innovation—thus promoting competitiveness, trade, consumer protection, environmental care and the quality of products and processes.
- 5.
Bolzano’s “Agenzia CasaClima” (“HouseClimate Agency”) is a public body dedicated to certifying the energy systems in buildings. So far the Agency has certified over 2,500 buildings to be found not only in Bolzano Province (in the North East of Italy) but also throughout Italy. The Agency offers training programmes for building workers and promotes initiatives for making the public aware of and sensitive to energy saving, sustainability and climate change.
- 6.
For instance, when a good’s price is fixed or accepted without including all the costs deriving from it and its use, there is an inefficiency which may mean excessive production—maximising the net benefit of a private individual or firm and raising unbalanced external costs. Such excesses exist at a remove from the optimum of social equilibrium which could be attained through the free play of market forces (cf. Bignami 2010).
- 7.
See in Italy, for instance, the recent floods in areas such as Liguria, Veneto, Cinque Terre, Lunigiana and Genova or see the earthquakes in L’Aquila and Emilia. Such events have led to a continuing debate on the time and costs to cover the damage done and have produced long-lasting negotiations to find the finance by means of new taxes or various allowances in budgets.
- 8.
Even though, sometimes, if an area is struck by a disaster, going back to the previous state is undesirable, as it would leave the territory just as vulnerable to the next disaster (because the original state was itself vulnerable).
- 9.
By means of preventive or corrective maintenance—preventive in repairing deterioration due ageing structure or plants; corrective in replacing obsolescent features which may be economic, technological, functional or normative in nature.
- 10.
In Italy UNI EN ISO 19011:2003, on the basis of which CEPRED was developed.
- 11.
From the text of ISO 19011:2002 “ISO 19011:2002 provides guidance on the principles of auditing, managing audit programmes, conducting quality management system audits and environmental management system audits, as well as guidance on the competence of quality and environmental management system auditors.
It is applicable to all organizations needing to conduct internal or external audits of quality and/or environmental management systems or to manage an audit programme.
The application of ISO 19011 to other types of audits is possible in principle provided that special consideration is paid to identifying the competence needed by the audit team members in such cases”.
- 12.
Also foreseen in the norms ISO/IEC 17021:2011 and ISO 19011:2011: “Audit scope: extent and boundaries of an audit”.
- 13.
Consideration led to the opinion that no “normal” building can resist or offer significant protection from radiation in the case of a nuclear accident. The idea of signalling distances from the nearest nuclear plants was considered deceptive because of the various factors in the spread of radiation and people’s ability to react to it. Factors would be wind direction and intensity (its altitude, too) the amount of radiation released, efficiency of alarm system, etc. In the same way, disasters linked to the offshore oil and gas industry and transportation is yet not included in our rating system (at the moment not even in the sea-coast risk preliminary ideas).
- 14.
When a group of animals begins to run with no clear heed since it is an act of mass impulse among animal herds.
- 15.
These kinds of risks are considered, at least in the context of developed countries, not significant as hazard for buildings, or not relevant in occurrence.
- 16.
Starting in the early hours of the night of 2nd September, the fire went on for 3 days, burning much of the city. Some 13,200 dwellings were destroyed, as were dozens of churches, shops and public buildings. A hundred thousand people were left homeless. The fire had started at Thomas Farrior’s, baker to Charles II, in Pudding Lane. Accounts of the event say that Farrior went to bed forgetting to put out the fire in his shop furnace; it seems that sparks of burning embers set light to a nearly pile of firewood, hence the flames that spread from the shop to the rest of the city. At that time most of London’s buildings were basically wooden structures in themselves reasonably fire-proof but these houses were often thatched and thatch can burn easily, ignited by sparks flying in the flame-heated air. The high temperatures reached in the open spaces heated by the blazing rows of buildings meant that materials even those usually resistant could easily catch fire.
- 17.
Without simplification (applicable only with informed reference to specific scenarios)—as in our case, which refers to precise conditions of buildings—the risk expression would refer to convolution taking account of the probability-distribution of the chance variables it depends on.
- 18.
It would be really useless to enter information telling us that a Milan block of flats is not exposed to volcanic risk as it might be in Naples. Or that a building in Rome faces no avalanche risk as it might in the Valle d’Aosta. Or that a Cagliari school stands no seismic risk as it might in Messina. Such information cannot be used for evaluation or comparison between areas.
- 19.
From the text of the Italian Norm UNI EN 19011:2003 (February 2003)—Note: “Auditing usually include a description of physical locality, of organising units, of eventual activities and procedures, as well as an indication of the time required”.
- 20.
The AHP is a method for helping multicriteria decisions. It was developed by T. Saaty in the late 1970s. It foresees, when weighting various indicators/alternatives, the decider’s use of pair comparisons and a subsequent hierarchy recomposition of these. Its application requires numerous interviews which, in our case, should be made specifically for each activity programme. What is more, the eventual results from different areas would have no comparison value.
- 21.
Multi-criteria ELECTRE (Elimination Et Choix Traduisant la Réalité, in French: Elimination and choice expressing reality) method is a series of specific ways to combine the criteria in a global assessment (here risk assessment) process. The global level of risk does not rely on a mean value computed over the criteria but on the comparison of the studied zones in pairs or with predetermined virtual zones characterising the limits between the classes (being the zones compared with each other on the basis of all criteria). A zone is more risky than another if a majority of criteria (weighted factors taken into account) give a higher risk compared with the other.
- 22.
The average surface of the Italian provinces’ area is ca. 2.700 km2.
- 23.
The same choice regarding risk indices has been made in various projects dealing with risk. For example, we can quote the analysis method for the transport risk of hazardous goods in the Italian-Swiss interreg project called “DESTINATION”—Conoscere il trasporto delle merci pericolose come strumento di tutela del territorio—Information on the transport of hazardous goods, as a territory safeguard— www.regione.piemonte.it/ambiente/europa/dwd/destination.pdf.
- 24.
Random House Websters Dictionary. In Italian it is quite the same with the difference between Predisposizione and Propensione.
- 25.
From this view point, energy certification in Italy, according to the decree D. Lgs. n. 311/2006, only requires the building’s location in one of six climate -zones (A, B, C, D, E, F) so as to signal the various top values for thermal transmittance U, as far as every closing structure is concerned .
- 26.
Establishing the context in ISO 31000 is to pin-point the objective of the organization, the environment in which it pursues those objectives, its stakeholders and the diversity of risk criteria—all of which help reveal and assess the nature and complexity of its risks.
- 27.
Following the scheme of “The information Pyramid” (Hammond et al. 1995).
- 28.
This possibility is also provided by other certification systems like, for instance, that of the CasaClima Agency.
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Bignami, D.F. (2014). Choices in Developing the PRED Certification Scheme. In: Towards a Territorial Multi-Disaster Buildings’ Resistance Certification. SpringerBriefs in Environmental Science. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-5223-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-5223-9_2
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