Rockfall risk assessment to persons travelling in vehicles along a road: the case study of the Amalfi coastal road (southern Italy)

Settimio Ferlisi (), Leonardo Cascini, Jordi Corominas and Fabio Matano

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2012, vol. 62, issue 2, 721 pages

Abstract: The paper deals with the assessment of rockfall risk to persons travelling in vehicles along the SS163 road, an important transportation corridor supporting a high vehicle traffic within the well-known tourist area of the Amalfi Coast (southern Italy). To this aim, the Rockfall Hazard Rating System (RHRS) and quantitative risk assessment (QRA) procedures, in this latter case for three rockfall risk scenarios, are applied. With reference to a large portion (33.820 out of a total of 50.365 km) of the SS163 road, the obtained QRA results highlight that, although the estimated individual risk to life satisfies the adopted tolerable risk criterion, the computed societal risk cannot be tolerated. Starting from this result, site-specific QRA analyses—carried out with reference to some road sections chosen on the basis of the RHRS results—allow the detection of the SS163 portions where the individual risk to life exceeds the tolerable risk threshold and, then, the recourse to mitigation measures could reveal necessary. In this regard, RHRS and QRA methods can be considered complementary tools in prioritizing the road sections where construction funds can be profitably spent in order to mitigate the rockfall risk with reference to both direct consequences (life loss) and indirect ones (traffic delay and diversions). Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Keywords: Rockfall; Risk for life loss; RHRS method; QRA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-012-0102-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:62:y:2012:i:2:p:691-721

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-012-0102-z

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().