A new project has been funded by the ECHO environment (European Commission Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department), concerning the development of a new capability for the post-seismic structural assessment. The coordinating beneficiary of the project is the Italian Department of Civil Protection, with partners EUCENTRE and the Department of Fire, Public rescue and Civil Defense.
The project DRHOUSE (Development of Rapid Highly-specialized Operative Units for Structural Evaluation) is inserted within the perspective of integrating the shortage of disaster-response capacity at the European level in the field of post-earthquake structural evaluation.
The main objective is the development and implementation of a new Civil Protection Module targeted to enhance the European Rapid Response Capability within the European Community Mechanism for civil protection.
In order to ensure modularity of the action and the interoperability among modules, the capability has been conceived as composed by three sub-modules, which can either work together or independently:
            1. Basic Seismic Assessment module (BSA): for usability assessment of common buildings
           2. Advanced Seismic Assessment module (ASA): for strategic and/or complex structures, with dedicated advanced instrumentation and procedures
            3. Short-term countermeasures module (STC): to prop up damaged structures and infrastructures.
            Such a structure is also able to ensure in the future the possibility of a modular implementation by the MS according to the available resources.

A dedicated section for the Project will be soon available on the website.