Margherita Palace Structural Collapse
Forensic Structural Analysis -EarthquakeL’Aquila, Italy
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Forensic Engineering
During the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, the tower of Santo Stefano di Sessanio suffered a structural collapse, and toppled to the ground. ASI was called in to perform a Forensic Seismic Analysis using our 3D nonlinear dynamic analysis software. The towns iconic symbol was believed to have been rendered vulnerable to collapse because of 20th-century renovations to the tower’s observation platform, which replaced a wooden deck with one made of reinforced concrete, thus making the tower top-heavy.
In the current study, a numerical analysis was used for investigating the collapse behavior of the tower. Doing an initial elastic model of the tower did not allow any realistic prediction of the anomalous seismic behavior showed by the tower; the reason why only a stump of structure actually survived the earthquake remained unexplained.
