Nepalese School Building Stock and Implications on Seismic Vulnerability Assessment

The last catastrophic seismic events in Nepal have shown that the Nepalese school building stock is characterized by a high level of vulnerability with respect to seismic actions. According to different post-event reconnaissance reports, thousands of schools have been destroyed by the 2015 earthquakes, depriving the country of a fundamental social and economic asset. Within the SAFER (Seismic Safety and Resilience of Schools in Nepal) project, a specific working task is dedicated to the assessment of school structures in terms of probabilistic fragility functions. These curves will be included in a comprehensive seismic risk management framework for the Nepalese community. However, the derivation of fragilities has to be preceded by: (i) a meaningful subdivision of the total building inventory in different structural typologies, (ii) a detailed investigation about the recurrent seismic damage and failure modes of Nepalese constructions. These two aspects and their implications on the selection of proper structural assessment methodologies are carefully discussed and mapped in the present paper.