GNGTS 2023 - Atti del 41° Convegno Nazionale

Session 2.2 GNGTS 2023 support of the section on Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience of UNESCO (hereinafter UNESCO DRR) and of local UNESCO offices. The VISUS methodology VISUS is a technical-triage methodology which focuses on the safety assessment of a large number of existing learning facilities adopting a multi-hazard perspective, with the purpose to provide decision-makers with the information for supporting the definition of a safety upgrading action plan (Fig. 1). The safety assessment concerns the school physical environment, and in detail school buildings and facilities, schoolyard, and location of the school. The multi-hazard VISUS methodology permits to assess safety conditions considering earthquake, air- and water-related hazards, as well as fire and the day-by-day threats which could occur in schools. VISUS was developed to assess a large number of learning facilities for governance purposes (i.e. to understand the situation and the required safety upgrading treatment). The development of VISUS considered the analogy to medical triage in disaster medicine, where there is a need to quickly assess the safety situation of many patients to prioritise intervention and treatment for each patient. A similar rapid and pragmatic approach was taken in VISUS to assess the safety of the learning facilities by trained surveyors, who are usually students from local engineering or architecture faculties. This choice implied a hard work in identifying the substantial information to acquire for the safety assessment, following the rule of "as much as enough". Therefore, several experts from different disciplines were involved to identify and pre-codify which is the substantial information that surveyors need to collect, and to formulate the algorithms that use this information to assess the safety of each school. The VISUS safety assessment considers all the main issues that could affect learning facilities, i.e., the structural global and local behaviour of buildings (in terms of potential general or local collapse or damage to structural elements), the presence of non-structural problems (e.g., the potential fall of false ceilings), and functional aspects (e.g. related to the evidence of escape routes that could be blocked during or immediately after the occurrence of a hazardous event). In addition, it is important to check the location of the school and avoid unsuitable sites (e.g., schools in landslide-prone areas). Since the characteristics of learning facilities (and thus the critical issues) can change anywhere in the world, VISUS was designed to be easily and quickly adaptable to different local conditions. For adaptation, VISUS requires the support of local experts who provide the necessary information according to a pre-codified procedure. Adaptation also aims at improving the training on the VISUS methodology, providing examples of the local specificities. VISUS is based on capacity building, which is achieved through three trainings: for decision-makers, for trainers (usually professors from local universities), and for VISUS surveyors (usually students from local technical universities or local technicians). Training is also the first step for VISUS implementation (Fig. 1); it enables capacity building at the local level for self-managed survey implementation. When survey data is collected (via the VISUS