POST - EARTHQUAKE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HISTORIC CITY CENTRE OF L’AQUILA: A PROPOSAL CONCERNING THE RUBBLE TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM

Post -earthquake reconstruction of the historic city Centre of L’Aquila, Italy, can be considered as the largest building site now under operation in Europe. The earthquake that hit the city of L’Aquila on the 6th April 2009 generated a so-called seismic crater that comprises 56 municipalities and concerns an area of almost 2.400 Km2. The earthquake of 2009 destroyed or severely damaged all historic buildings of the city Centre. Nowadays, in 2020 there are more than 8.000 completed construction projects that produced almost 4.000.000 t of removed rubble. The reconstruction process of L’Aquila has been soon defined as “the biggest construction site of Europe”. This experience of managing a huge number of construction projects in the same town highlighted the need of a multi-project coordination of the re-construction activities, and a central co-ordination office has been created. Problems concerning the co-ordination of many construction sites that are located very close to each-other are many and are related to the organization and sharing of different resources: space for tower cranes, access routes for vehicles, space for temporary scaffoldings and space for debris storage and disposal. The programme management of these production resources needs to be based on a General Management plan that is proposed. In particular, the problem of rubble production, transport and storage has been addressed in the plan proposition. In fact, the production, transportation and storage of rubble produced by construction operations can be considered one of the main criteria of the multi-project optimization process needed for the co-ordination of the city reconstruction. As a pilot study, a simulation of project co-ordination of an urban area that includes eleven building blocks under re-construction has been performed with the traditional resource levelling procedure. Therefore, the reconstruction programme schedule of the area has been optimized considering the process constraints due to quantitative limits of rubble transportation and disposal