Development of a Seismic Risk Model for Northern Algeria

Abstract

A collaborative effort was made within the scope of the EU project ITERATE to develop a web-based tool for large-scale probabilistic assessment intended to enable Algerian stakeholders to understand and calculate seismic risk though the convolution of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. A great amount of information was collected, organized and processed to determine the characteristics of the Northern Algerian built inventory (buildings and bridges) in terms of quantity, location, typology and structural behavior, using the city of Blida as pilot case-study. Furthermore, the vulnerability of the inventory was evaluated through the development of fragility curves, based on the observed behavior of a great number of nonlinear structural models under the effect of multiple earthquake records, accounting for epistemic and aleatory uncertainties. The developed exposure and vulnerability models, along with an updated seismic hazard model were loaded to a specifically developed web application which allows the probabilistic evaluation of seismic event scenarios, as well as automated predictions in terms of human and economic losses.