Identification of most relevant factors for demolition: a study on damaged buildings after L'Aquila earthquake

The evaluation of building reparability after damaging earthquakes is a complex issue, involving factors such as the damage state, residual capacity and post -earthquake safety, initial performance level with respect to design earthquake and repair and retrofit costs [1]. In the post -earthquake reconstruction process after the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, the funding request had to be accompanied by a detailed assessment of repair costs, the pre- earthquake safety level respect to new building standard (%NBS) and, if needed , by a detailed design of retrofit intervention and costs. Here we examine the database of severely dam aged buildings after L’Aquila , collect ing information of repair and retrofit costs as well as the final decision on reparability , to determine most important factors influencing demolition decisions for Reinforced Concrete (RC) buildings ; 122 out of 472 se verely damaged RC buildings were demolished. A logi stic regression is performed to estimate the probability of demolition p dem for building typologies. Considering pre -earthquake information, the construction age is the most influential parameter, with old er buildings having a higher p dem . Other significant parameter is %NBS. Considering post -earthquake information, the repair cost is expected ly the most important parameter . It results that p dem can be expressed as a function of construction age, %NBS and r epair costs.