During the last decades earthquakes have been responsible in European Countries for significant loss of human life and damage to infrastructures. In this scenario it was frequently experienced that one of the most difficult problems that engineers and Civil Protection agencies face after a seismic event consists in rapidly assessing all affected structures and determining whether they can offer acceptable levels of safety in case other earthquakes would occur.

After an earthquake has occurred a first rapid assessment is performed and frequently many buildings are rated to be dangerous and people living inside are forced to leave. Quite often this first assessment is performed on the basis of experience or using some outward and superficial controls (visual control, vulnerability checklists, etc.) and in many cases it tends to be very conservative and to downgrade the majority of the examined structures specially if the assessment procedure is performedby non experienced technicians.

Fast assessment in post earthquake emergency could be improved with the use of special units (1 units might consists of a mobile lab and one working team of 5-6 engineers/technicians) very well equipped and trained, capable of rapidly move in the critical area and perform in-situ test and analysis increasing the consistency of the evaluation procedure and thus reducing the number of errors when ranking the structures. These specialized units could also be employed for pre-earthquake vulnerability assessment.

STEP project will focus on the methods to perform fast and reliable assessment in post earthquake emergency and how it can be integrated to Civil Protection ‘traditional’ procedures.