Liquefaction of soil in the Emilia-Romagna region after the 2012 Northern Italy earthquake sequence

Domenico Lombardi () and Subhamoy Bhattacharya

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2014, vol. 73, issue 3, 1749-1770

Abstract: At the end of May 2012, the Po plain region in northern Italy was shaken by a long sequence of seismic events. The 2012 Northern Italy earthquake sequence counted two mainshocks, about 1,600 aftershocks and lasted for several weeks. Although the mainshocks, which occurred on May 20 and May 29, 2012, registered a moment magnitude of 5.9 and 5.8, respectively, these two events caused widespread soil liquefaction and substantial damages to the built environment. This paper reports lessons learnt from a field investigation conducted in the areas affected by the earthquake sequence. Based on the field observations, it was concluded that despite the relatively low magnitudes of the shocks, most of the damages occurred as a consequence of liquefaction phenomena and/or absence of retrofitting of historical structures. The latter comprise churches, tower bells, towers, castles and fortresses. It was found that the occurrence of liquefaction was mainly associated with the presence of saturated alluvial soil deposits which were characterised by high liquefaction susceptibility. It was noted that these highly liquefiable soils were mainly located in proximity of ancient river courses that were artificially diverted in the eighteenth century to mitigate flooding and other hydrological risks. Copyright European Union 2014

Keywords: Liquefaction; Field survey; Seismic hazard; Ground failure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-014-1168-6 (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:73:y:2014:i:3:p:1749-1770

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-014-1168-6

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 ().