1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

As natural or artificial earthen structures that provides flood protection adjacent to rivers or coastal areas, levees should be verified for several relevant design situations. For this verification, Eurocode 7 adopts semi-probabilistic approach, which utilizes statistical methods to select characteristic values of geotechnical parameters, thus neglecting spatial correlation between the same parameter at different sampling points, and cross-correlation between different parameters at the same sampling point. The degree of uncertainty involved in calculation of levee response to seismic loads is especially high and implementation of probabilistic approach for evaluation of seismic resilience of levees will yield more reliable insight into the behaviour of levees both during low and high waters. This paper contributes to the efforts of levee seismic vulnerability evaluations, through development of fragility curves as functions that describe the conditional probability of levee stability failure over the full range of seismic and water loads to which the levee might be exposed.