Regional Earthquake Risk Assessment of Bornova District, İzmir

Türkiye is located on active fault systems and is exposed to a high level of seismic risk. İzmir, one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas, lies on the Western Anatolian Fault Zone in the Aegean Region and is frequently affected by earthquakes. Assessing the seismic performance of the city’s building stock under realistic earthquake scenarios is essential for understanding and mitigating potential risks. In this context, evaluating the vulnerability of buildings in urban areas plays a critical role in disaster preparedness and urban resilience. This study conducts a regional earthquake risk assessment for the Bornova district of İzmir using ground motion records from the 2020 Samos Earthquake. The analysis is performed with the open-source R2D (Regional Resilience Determination) tool developed by the NHERI SimCenter. The focus is on reinforced concrete (RC) buildings, which constitute a significant portion of the district’s building inventory. The study evaluates potential damage states, estimates average repair costs based on damage severity, and reports maximum absolute accelerations and story drift ratios for each structure. A total of 50 RC buildings in Bornova were analyzed through nonlinear time history simulations. The resulting damage levels were mapped, and seismic risk distributions were derived and compared with observed post-earthquake damage in the field. The simulation outcomes showed strong agreement with the actual damage data, indicating the reliability of the modeling approach. Notably, the results revealed that 49 of the 50 buildings remained in the “no damage” category under the simulated ground motions.