Seismic hazard assessments at Islamic Cairo, Egypt

•We applied probabilistic and deterministic hazards assessment to Islamic Cairo.•We used characteristics for 28 seismic zones in and around Egypt.•The results obtained showed the expected ground acceleration is relatively high.•Results indicate a plan should be implemented to save the area.

Islamic Cairo is one of the important Islamic monumental complexes in Egypt, near the center of present-day metropolitan Cairo. The age of these buildings is up to one thousand years. Unfortunately, many of the buildings are suffering from huge mishandling that may lead to mass damage. Many buildings and masjids were partially and totally collapsed because of 12th October 1992 Cairo earthquake that took place at some 25 km from the study area with a magnitude Mw = 5.8. Henceforth, potential damage assessments there are compulsory. The deterministic and probabilistic techniques were used to predict the expected future large earthquakes' strong-motion characteristics in the study area. The current study started with compiling the available studies concerned with the distribution of the seismogenic sources and earthquake catalogs. The deterministic method is used to provide a description of the largest earthquake effect on the area of interest, while the probabilistic method, on the other hand, is used to define the uniform hazard curves at three time periods 475, 950, 2475 years. Both deterministic and probabilistic results were obtained for bedrock conditions and the resulted hazard levels were deaggregated to identify the contribution of each seismic source to the total hazard. Moreover, the results obtained show that the expected seismic activities combined with the present situation of the buildings pose high alert to rescue both the cultural heritage and expected human losses.