GUIDELINES FOR DESIGNING TEMPORARY PREVENTIVE ANTI-SEISMIC SAFETY FEATURES FOR HISTORIC CHURCHES

The present document contains guidelines for designing temporary preventive safety features in order to improve the seismic behavior of historic buildings as churches. The benefits of a temporary and preventive intervention are numerous [1]: a. it permits a better seismic behavior with a low-cost solution, waiting a definitive intervention. After its use, it can be removed; b. it allows, at the beginning of an earthquake swarm, a quick installation of the safety feature to use the church during the events. Nevertheless, it preserves the building and the artistic assets contained within it in case of a strong earth motion. c. it simplifies a large-scale planning of consolidation activities of churches by means of low-cost, temporary and preventive safety features. These will be used for buildings of cultural heritage intended to be reinforced at a later stage. Qualifying aspect of the temporary safety features are related to the quickness, the cheapness, the ease of their installation and removal, allowing at the same time the use of the buildings. In addition, they require a minimum amount of space and have a low aesthetical impact, resulting in a good solution for temporary consolidation of historic churches.