Improved seismic risk estimation for Bucharest, based on multiple hazard scenarios and analytical methods

•A review of studies that analyze seismic risk aspects of Bucharest is presented.•We provide a comprehensive description of the seismic loss estimation methods used.•We describe and show the implementation of recent hazard and vulnerability datasets.•Based on a new empirical methodology we increase the accuracy of the estimates.•Multiple scenarios are computed and relevant representations are presented.

Bucharest, capital of Romania, is one of the most exposed big cities in Europe to seismic damage, due to the intermediate-depth earthquakes in the Vrancea region, to the vulnerable building stock and local soil conditions.This paper tries to answer very important questions related to the seismic risk at city scale that were not yet adequately answered. First, we analyze and highlight the bottlenecks of previous risk-related studies. Based on new researches in the hazard of Bucharest (recent microzonation map and ground-motion prediction equations, reprocessed real recorded data) and in vulnerability assessment (analytical methods, earthquake loss estimation software like SELENA and ELER, the recently implemented Near Real-Time System for Estimating the Seismic Damage in Romania) we provide an improved estimation of the number of buildings and population that could be affected, for different earthquake scenarios. A new method for enhancing the spatial resolution of the building stock data is used successfully.