On the Application of the New Italian Bridge Guidelines: The Case of Sardinia Region

Considering the collapses which have involved several existing bridges in Italy during the last years, specific new guidelines on risk classification and manage-ment, safety assessment and monitoring of existing bridges have been issued in 2020. These guidelines are organized in six levels (from level 0 to 5), that are characterized by different activities: (i) level 0 is defined by the census of the fun-damental properties of the bridge, (ii) level 1 involves the visual inspection of the structure to obtain defects and the main geometric parameters of the viaduct, and the hydraulic and geo-morphological properties of the site, (iii) level 2 defines the Class of Attention of the bridge calculated considering the hazard, the vulnerabil-ity and the exposure parameters obtained from the previous levels, (iv) level 3 is a preliminary assessment of the bridge to evaluate the need to proceed with the lev-el 4 analyses, (v) level 4 is characterized by an accurate evaluation of the structur-al elements of the viaduct according to the Italian Design Code and (vi) level 5 concerns the evaluation of the robustness of the road network. In this paper, the application of the first three levels of analysis of the new guidelines to a stock of bridges located in Sardinia is presented. The census anal-ysis, visual inspection and the definition of the Class of Attention of bridges were performed. The results obtained are analyzed from a critical point of view in order to highlight the limitations of the proposed procedure.