In a seismic territory, one of the concerns of the public administrators is to guarantee
people’s safety in case of an earthquake occurrence, mainly in public facilities and in particular
in school buildings. Public administrations are facing a complex problem and they often need
to answer the following questions: what school must be adequate first? Why? What typologies of
intervention are necessary? What level of safety is it possible to reach? How much is the cost of
retrofitting? How many interventions can be managed with the available resources? How to manage/treat
the most critical cases? How to communicate the level of risk to people? These questions
point out that the definition of a rational and effective strategy for the mitigation of seismic risk
implies the necessity to know the level of risk and the criticalities together with the required countermeasures
and their costs. All this knowledge permits to carry out an evaluation of the needed economical
effort in terms of necessary global financial amount and, consequently, the definition of the
practicable strategies for risk mitigation. This problem has been addressed in the ASSESS (Analysis
of the seismic scenarios of the school buildings for a definition of retrofitting priorities for seismic
risk reduction) project, aimed at knowing the seismic risk of the schools of Friuli Venezia Giulia
region for preventive purposes. Specific decision-making supports have been defined in order to
facilitate public administrators in the management of rational seismic risk mitigation strategies.
