VISUS methodology: A quick assessment for defining safety upgrading strategies of school facilities

This paper evaluates the VISUS (Visual Inspection for defining the Safety Upgrading Strategies) method in Friuli, Italy and three geographical departments of El Salvador (La Paz, La Libertad and San Salvador). The trials aimed to improve the methodology by applying the VISUS method as a tool for assessing school safety, which has been accommodated to fulfil the assessment requirements of the Comprehensive School Safety (CSS) framework.

This paper finds that VISUS could be used as effective decision making tool for planning actions in risk mitigation at a regional scale following a rational approach. VISUS is adaptable to different local contexts and needs. The method provides different sub-products, such as the transfer of scientific knowledge through the capacity building of local engineers and decision makers; a mobile application for collecting related data; the production of school’s individual and collective reports; and geo-referenced national inventories of schools in mapping platforms such as OpenStreetMap or GeoNode.

VISUS was first developed aiming to assess schools in a seismic scenario, but it has evolved into a holistic and multi-hazard approach that considers five issues: site conditions, structural performance, local structural criticalities, non-structural components and functional aspects. Each issue is analysed using a pre-codification of the expert reasoning, splitting the assessment in two main phases: the characterization and the evaluation. As a result, simple graphical indicators summarize the evaluation pointing out the main weaknesses and the needs of intervention.