Damage assessment of churches exposed to slope displacements in sliding areas

Protecting cultural heritage from water-soil interaction related threats is a current issue and the prediction of the effects of slope displacements on buildings is very challenging. The achievement of this goal is not straightforward since it usually requires high costs due to the great amount of data to be collected for setting up reliable forecasting models. Among these threats, slow moving landslides are considered in this research, because also small slope movements can seriously affect existing structures and cause damages. In this regard, the aim is to develop a simple but effective procedure to correlate the potential damage caused to soil displacements to the slope safety conditions, represented by an “intensity parameter” such as the slope safety factor. Churches located in, or close to, landslide areas, have been chosen as exposed structures: this choice makes the theme more challenging for the structural and geometric complexities of these particular historic buildings. Furthermore, while modelling and estimating the effects induced by deep excavations or tunnelling on existing buildings are known and widely treated geotechnical problems, the assessment of the damage caused by landslide movement has not been fully developed and only limited material exists in the literature. The procedure developed and proposed in the Thesis takes into account: i) identification and characterization of the exposed elements; ii) assessment of displacements and associated strain level components caused by slope movement via numerical analyses; iii) iii) proposal and assessment of an intensity parameter representative of deformations and stability conditions; iv) iv) assessment of damage severity levels and develop of fragility curves, v) v) validation of the proposed approach.