Damage and loss assessment of pre-70 RC frame buildings with FEMA P-58

Past earthquakes have shown that seismic events may incur large economic losses in buildings. FEMA P-58 provides engineers a practical tool for the performance seismic assessment of buildings. In this article, FEMA P-58 is applied to a typical Italian pre-1970 reinforced concrete frame building, characterized by plain rebars as steel reinforcement and masonry infills and partitions. Given that suitable tools for these buildings are missing in FEMA P-58, in the first part of the article, specific fragility curves and loss functions for the main structural and non-structural components of the building type under consideration are proposed. In the second part, building performance is evaluated following a time-based assessment approach. Expected economic losses in form of repair costs are then derived. Finally, results are compared with those from past applications to old RC frame buildings.