Seismic risk investigation for reinforced concrete buildings in Antalya, Turkey

Turkey is located in one of the most seismically active regions of in Europe. The majority of the population living in big cities are at high seismic risk due to insufficient structural resistance of the existing buildings. Such a seismic risk brings the need for a comprehensive seismic evaluation based on the risk analysis in Turkey. Determining the seismic resistance level of existing building stock against the earthquakes is the first step to reduce the damages in a possible earthquake. Recently in January 2020, the Elazig earthquake brought the importance of the issue again in the public. However, the excessive amount of building stock, labor, and resource problems made the implementation phase almost impossible and revealed the necessity to carry out alternative studies on this issue. This study aims for a detailed investigation of residential buildings in Antalya, Turkey. The approach proposed here can be considered an improved state of building survey methods previously identified in Turkey's Design Code. Antalya, Turkey's fifth most populous city, with a population over 2.5 Million, was investigated as divided into sub-regions to understand the vulnerability, and a threshold value found for the study area. In this study, 26,610 reinforced concrete buildings between 1 to 7 stories in Antalya were examined by using the rapid visual assessment method. A specific threshold value for the city of Antalya was determined with the second level examination and statistical methods carried out in the determined sub-region. With the micro zonation process, regions below the threshold value are defined as the priority areas that need to be examined in detail. The developed methodology can be easily calibrated for application in other cities and can be used to determine new threshold values for those cities.