Citation

Miniati R, Capone P, Hosser D. Int. J. Disaster Risk Reduct. 2014; 9: 12-25.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ijdrr.2014.03.008

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

As it represents the final point of the whole rescue chain, hospital infrastructure is one of the most important elements of medical response to earthquakes. In order to correctly manage the emergency by providing the most efficient medical response, it is fundamental to carry out a simple, rapid and reliable risk assessment of seismic impact on hospitals. The purpose of this work was to develop a decision support system for helping the decision makers with the seismic risk mitigation of health structures.

A new integrated methodology, based on a combination of two main research approaches (theory of complex systems and the rapid seismic vulnerability assessment), was implemented and applied for risk mitigation to OSMA Florence Hospital and to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in California, US. The results of the study can serve as a support to decision makers for seismic risk mitigation of modern health structures by providing a model for estimating cost for the application of different retrofitting actions.

They showed that the Leontieff model is less robust and reliable than FTA especially for high seismic intensity scenarios while simulations on risk mitigation estimated that structural interventions (Florence at M=6 and US at M=8) did not add any further appreciable improvements to the non-structural actions.