Special Topics In Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering






1.1 Introduction

The Abruzzo earthquake of April 6, 2009 caused considerable damage to structures over an area of approximately 600 km

, including the urban centre of L’Aquila and several villages of the middle Aterno valley. Even for similar types of buildings, the distribution of damage within the affected area was irregular, due to both rupture directivity effects (Chioccarelli and Iervolino 2009 ) and site amplifi cation phenomena.


In the fi rst section of the paper, the ground motion in the epicentral area is described through the analysis of the records of the seismic stations located close to L’Aquila.

The second section presents a selection of results of in situ and laboratory tests carried out at various sites in the area of L’Aquila, including soil deposits of particular

interest for the after-earthquake investigations.

The data were collected from both previous

tests by the geotechnical group of the University of L’Aquila



and new investigations carried out after the earthquake

by a task force of the Italian Geotechnical Society (AGI).


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