Damage Assessment of Historic Masonry Churches Exposed to Slow-moving Landslides

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a first contribution to the damage assessment of historic masonry churches exposed to slow-moving landslides. No studies have ever been devoted to systematically investigating the effects of slow-moving landslides on this type of structures. In this work, a damage survey campaign was performed on 33 listed churches located in landslides-affected areas in the Liguria region (Italy). For each church, information regarding zoning, state of activity and estimate direction of landslide phenomena was collected and analysed. A suitable knowledge of the main geometric and structural features as well as of history and past interventions was achieved for each building by means of on-site surveys and archival research. A detailed field-survey of crack patterns and deformations was also performed. The critical assessment of the damage observed allowed to put forward some original remarks on the structural response of historic masonry churches to slow-moving landslides. Furthermore, some recurrent types of damage and damage mechanisms were identified for the first time.

KEYWORDS:

• Damage assessment
• historic churches
• masonry buildings
• slow-moving landslides
• vulnerability

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Arch. Andrea Fenialdi for his contribution to the performance of on-site surveys and the preparation of figures, and Prof. Pere Roca from the Technical University of Catalonia for the fruitful discussions regarding damage interpretation. Finally, the authors would like to express their gratitude to the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, and, in particular, to the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle arti e Paesaggio per la Citta’ metropolitana di Genova e le province di Imperia, La Spezia e Savona for its fruitful collaboration (Framework Convention n. 20/2018) and for providing full access to the documentation conserved in its archives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Additional information

Funding

The financial support of PRIN 2015 Program by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) is gratefully acknowledged for funding the research project “Protecting the Cultural Heritage from water-soil interaction related threats” (Prot. No. 2015EAM9S5), which is the main framework of the study presented in this article.