Vulnerability assessment for masonry buildings based on observed damage from the 2016 Amatrice Earthquake

Recent earthquakes around the world and in Italy showed the seismic vulnerability of the existing building stock. This evidence stresses the need to develop accurate seismic fragili-ty tools, to be applied at territorial scale. Herein, seismic vulnerability curves for existing masonry buildings are developed, based on damage assessment carried out through visual survey and the Copernicus damage maps using EMS-98 damage scale. The observed dam-age dataset consists of damages occurred due to the 24th August 2016 Amatrice earthquake. The study focuses on seven towns close to the epicentre of Amatrice earthquake. The masonry building stock consists of selected buildings belonging to these towns. Ac-celerometric registrations for the considered earthquake are used to update the GMPE pre-dictions. The resulting ground shaking fields have been modified through application of explicit stratigraphic and topographic factors. It has been confirmed that explicit consider-ation of local site effects can significantly affect the seismic vulnerability evaluations