Assessing economic risk for businesses subject to seismic events

Recent seismic events have shown how industries and productive processes can be significantly vulnerable and suffer high financial losses in case of earthquake occurrence. Structural damages may also have serious consequences in terms of business interruption, leading in some cases to the bankruptcy of a damaged enterprise. For a proper estimation of potential losses for a company, it is therefore necessary to take into account both potential direct and business interruption losses. In the present contribution, a novel framework is proposed for exhaustively addressing the seismic risk assessment of an enterprise, also considering implications of business interruption. Lastly, an application of the proposed methodology to a typical Italian cheese factory case-study is illustrated.