Services
for emergency planning and management operators.
Medea
Damage and Usability Exercise Manual for ordinary masonry and reinforced concrete buildings.
What is Medea
The evaluation of the damage due to a seismic event on masonry or reinforced concrete buildings is a central problem inside the scientific community and one of the main factor for a post-event macroseismic assessment. Researchers attention is mainly focused on the identification of criteria and methods able to guarantee an objective evaluation, in order to find out the best correlation between the parameters measuring the seismic action and the damage.
At present many uncertainties and ambiguities exist either in the definition of the damage levels to assume or in the identification of the damage by the operators working in the survey. Moreover, during the post event emergency, the technicians always have to take decisions concerning the real safety of the buildings.
MEDEA (Manual for Earthquake Damage Evaluation and safety Assessment) is a dedicated software that offers interesting cues for an ‘objective’ evaluation of such damage. According to MEDEA, it could be possible to derive the most frequent damage typologies in masonry and reinforced concrete structures and a possible damaging model for quick and guided safety assessment. In fact, the damage assessment protocol is supported by forms where every damage type is described with notes, iconographic representations showing different damage levels, and possible links to their associated collapse mechanisms. This helps to reduce the level of uncertainty in the assessment of safety during the survey. It contains a technical glossary, a picture archive and a section describing seismic damage analyses, which are also linked to compatible collapse mechanisms. It also contains a section on virtual reality examples of damage surveys and safety evaluations.
MEDEA is therefore mainly addressed to the technicians either involved in vulnerability assessment or employed in post event macroseismic evaluation. In both cases the uniqueness of the judgment of the surveyors is very important, because of the scientific aspects resulting from a standard damage measure (useful for the improving of the vulnerability function on one hand, and for a bigger harmonization in defining macroseismic fields on the other) and for the social aspects concerning the civil protection deriving from reliable damage estimation and static safety evaluation.
In addition MEDEA has showed to be an interest- ing teaching tool for university courses in the field of seismic engineering or emergency management.
How to activate the Medea agreement
1. To activate the agreement it is first necessary to submit an accreditation request through the form below, taking care to fill in the required fields.
2. Once the requirements have been verified, PLINIVS proceeds to accredit the requesting party by creating accounts, the access credentials of which are communicated via email to the requesting party.
3. Subsequently, it is possible for the requesting party to access this section and download the agreement document, which must be completed in all its parts and signed.
4. The last step consists in uploading the completed and signed agreementinto the Upload/Download Agreement section. Once the agreement has been sent, the procedure is concluded.
DPC services
The PLINIVS Study Center carries out dedicated research and service activities for the National Civil Protection Department, as a Competence Center referred to in point 3 of the Directive of the President of the Council of Ministers of 27 February 2004 established by Decree of the Head of the Department of Civil Protection n. 1922 of 15 May 2006 (link to the updated version of the Decree).
Main tasks and functions
Research activities
on topics relating to the evaluation of weakness, risk and impact on elements exposed to various hazards in the territory, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hydrogeological events, etc. ., as well as in the sector of mitigating the effects on humans and buildings.
Collection of data
relating to building structures located in areas exposed to phenomena resulting from a volcanic eruption (earthquakes, pyroclastic flows, ash fall, lahars, tsunamis, etc.) and development of analysis methodologies for evaluating the impact of these phenomena on buildings and humans.
Development of techniques
to mitigate damage to humans and building structures from seismic, volcanic, hydrogeological events, etc.
Economic evaluations
of the impact produced by seismic, volcanic, hydrogeological events, etc.