With about 6 million of inhabitants, and a large number of industrial plants, the Campanian region (southern Italy), is highly exposed to the seismic risk related to a moderate to large magnitude seismicity associated with active fault systems in the Apenninic belt. The 1980 M=6.9 Irpinia earthquake was the most recent destructive earthquake to occur in the region, causing more than 3000 causalities, and widespread serious damage to buildings and infrastructure throughout the whole region.

Considering an earthquake warning window ranging from tens of second before to hundred of seconds after an earthquake, several public infrastructures and buildings of strategic relevance (e.g. hospitals, gas pipelines, railways, railroads) of the Regione Campania can be considered as potential target-sites for experimenting with innovative technologies for data acquisition, processing and transmission. A potential application of an early warning system in the Campania region, assuming earthquakes occurring along the Apenninic chain, would consider an expected time delay to the first energetic S wave train varying between 14-20 sec at 40-60 km distance to 26-30 sec at about 80-100 km, from a crustal earthquake occurring in the source region. The latter is the typical time window available for mitigating earthquake effects through early warning in the city of Naples, where about 2 million of inhabitants live, including its suburbs.

Within the framework of an ongoing project financed by the Regional Department of Civil Protection, a prototype system for seismic early and post-event warning is being developed and tested, based on a dense, wide dynamic seismic network under installation in the Apenninic belt region (Irpinia Seismic Network). This prototype of an earthquake early warning system is based on a dense, wide-dynamic seismic network (24 bit data logger, three-component accelerometers and seismometers) deployed on a 100x100 km^2 area containing the potentially causative fault systems of interest for the region and its main cities. The early warning system network is conceived as a system where the levels of analysis and decision are distributed over the seismic network nodes.
This is realized through the implementation of virtual sub-nets managed by data concentrators (Local Control Centers). Each node of the network has to be able to process and analyze in real-time the first-P wave signal, and provide the measured quantities (arrival time, frequency, amplitude etc.) to its closest LCC. As more stations record the seismic signal, the new measurements are sent to and processed by the LCC, which cross checks the information coming from different stations, and outputs a progressively refined estimate of the earthquake's location and magnitude, along with their uncertainty. Due to the source-to-target distances for a target located in the city of Naples, the expected warning window can be sufficient to operate the automatic shut-down or disconnection of local industrial plants, and the controlling and protecting of sensitive target infrastructures such as gas pipelines, viaducts, railway network, operating rooms in hospital, high-risk industrial installations and relevant data bank servers.

Seismic attivity and early warning activity in Campania

Moreover, reliable predictions of most relevant ground motion parameters (peak values, spectral content, signal duration etc.) can be obtained within a short post-event time window (several hundred seconds) for the whole regional, based on direct measurements from the Irpinia network records in the source area, integrated by simulations of seismic wave field at larger distances. These measurements can be used to produce reliable shake maps by the integration of observed and simulated data.

The main SAFER products for this area will the testing of the implementation of active control systems for structures driven by the early warning network of Campania. Most of the procedure and methods developed in WP1 will be tested on the Campania Early Warning System.