Mapping Seismic Vulnerability and Risk of Cities： The MASSIVE Project

MASSIVE （mapping seismic vulnerability and risk of cities） is a GIS-based earthquake preparedness system that was developed under the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism project （GA No. 070401/2009/540429/SUB/A4）, in order to provide civil protection authorities with accurate, and easily transferable tools for generating up-to-date maps of seismic hazard, seismic vulnerability and seismic risk of buildings, at the scale of the single building block. In addition, MASSIVE developed and ran state-of-the-art models to assess the risk for population evacuation in dense urban agglomerations given an earthquake event. The MASSIVE methodology was designed, implemented and validated considering two European pilot sites, heavily struck by recent earthquakes, which are the western part of the Larger Metropolitan Area of Athens （GR）, and the city of L＇ Aquila in the Abruzzo Region （IT）. The validation of the results using past earthquake records shows that the performance of MASSIVE is prosperous, achieving a correlation between the modeled and the on-site measured PGAs （peak ground accelerations） higher than 0.75, while the correlation between the on-site reported building damages and the ones predicted by the MASSIVE system has been of the order of 0.80.