Seismic Geotechnical Hazard of the City of Catania (Italy)

A brief review of the principal results of a research conducted on the subsoil of the city of Catania, located in eastern Sicily (Italy), is presented. The city of Catania has been destroyed in the past by many earthquakes and particularly by the 1169 earthquake hav-ing XI MCS intensity, the 1693 earthquake having X MCS intensity and the 1818 earth-quake with VIII MCS intensity. The effect of local geotechnical conditions on damages suffered by buildings under seismic conditions has been widely recognized, as it is demonstrated by the Manual for Zonation on Seismic Geotechnical Hazards (1993) ed-ited by the International Society for Soil Mechanics and geotechnical Engineering. The evaluation of local amplification effects may be carried out by means of either rigorous complex methods of analysis or qualitative procedures. A semiquantitative procedure based on the definition of the Geotechnical Hazard Index has been applied for the zona-tion of the seismic geotechnical hazard of the city of Catania. The map of the geotechni-cal hazard has been compared with the map of the expected peak ground acceleration. As a result of this comparison, possible improvements of the Geotechnical Hazard In-dex evaluation has been described.