Planning for mitigation of seismic risk at regional level requires a preliminary assessment of the actual state of the assets concerned. If the plan relates to specific types of buildings such as schools, it is appropriate to establish priorities based on adequate information of each building. In particular, it is necessary to identify and characterize critical aspects, to define the intervention and estimate the costs. The assessment of the hazard of the site and the vulnerability of the building should be carried out within an overall framework. The paper presents the VISUS method (Vulnerability Inspection on Seismic Unitary Scenario), a methodology developed within the ASSESS project aimed at reducing the seismic risk of more than 1,000 schools in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region (N-E Italy). The methodology is based on visual inspection techniques designed to facilitate the identification of critical response of the buildings during earthquakes. The method, till now field-tested on about 200 inspections, allows to identify the “criticalities of seismic response” due to geometrical configurations associable to specific “effects” that can potentially produce characteristic damage scenarios in case of earthquake. The processing of data collected during the surveys are used for defining a set of indicators that allow us to define lists of priorities according to different criteria and that, if considered all together, permit to depict the overall situation of the building analyzed.
