Structural performance of URM school buildings during the 2019 Albania earthquakes

Özet

This paper aims to study the seismic performance of school buildings, which havebeen built in accordance with template unreinforced masonry [URM] school projectsin Albania. For this purpose, the most widely used two template designs which weredamaged during the 2019 Durrës (Albania) Earthquakes, have been selected. Analytical models of each school were prepared following the experimental data on thequality of the masonry constitutive components of the selected school buildings. Geotechnical investigations were deployed to obtain the soil characteristics of the areawhere the schools’ foundation are located. Nonlinear static analyses have been performed to obtain the seismic capacity, the performance point and the damage levelstates. The performance-based method has been used to that purpose. The detailedexamination of capacity curves and performance evaluation identified deficienciesand weak parts of the school building blocks. Results have shown that existing schoolbuildings constructed pre-modern codes are far from satisfying the required performance criteria, suggesting that urgent response and necessary measure should beput into action.