Damage, Vulnerability and Retrofitting Strategies for the Molise Hospital System Following the 2002 Molise, Italy, Earthquake

The earthquake of October 31, 2002, inflicted moderate damage on the region of Molise in southern Italy. However, it attracted much attention because almost all the victims were children killed in the structural failure of their primary school. This paper focuses on a different, but equally important, structural type: hospitals. The earthquake left them largely untouched. In the paper we first give a detailed picture of the structural damage and of the organization of emergency operations. Then we try to give guidance about the most effective retrofitting strategies for the regional hospital system as a whole, following a methodology developed in Nuti and Vanzi (1998b), which has been adjusted for this case study. Depending on the community decision criteria, the hospitals of Campobasso and Bojano appear to have the highest priority for retrofitting, even though they were unscathed by the event.