1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

Due to the earthquake on 22 March 2020 serious damage to thousands of buildings occurred above all in the historic centre of Zagreb. People were injured and escape routes were blocked by falling facades or parts of buildings.
Significantly mainly older and badly preserved buildings were damaged, whereas buildings built after 1964, which had to meet the requirements of the regulations for earthquake protection in the former Yugoslavia, showed minor damage.
Especially in earthquake zones, the history of the country in the form of historic buildings needs to be preserved, and accordingly it is precisely these buildings that need to be surveyed and assessed in terms of their performance in the event of an earthquake. Any previous damage should be repaired immediately so that in the event of an recurrent earthquake, there is no more danger to human life.
There is a need for repair methods that minimally disturb the building appearance in order to restore or improve the structural load-bearing capacity of existing buildings. The load-bearing capacity of a suitably strengthened facade and its fixings can be verified by tests - for these non-load-bearing elements for example, according to ETAG 001, Annex E [1].
This paper presents a method for post-repairing of façades on existing buildings to restore their structural load-bearing capacity. This method can be used to preserve historical building material on one hand, but also to upgrade the façade construction with the aim to meet requirements of earthquake design like protection of life and enabling rescue work after an earthquake. So called Meso-scale tests to check the load-bearing capacity are described as alternative to large shake table tests. The technical background is explained and the experiment results are illustrated.