# A Review of the Performance of Infilled RC Structures in Recent Earthquakes
## 3 Economic Losses Due to Earthquakes Related to the Infill Panels  
The seismic action is paramount among natural hazards affecting civil infrastructures and human activity all over the world. Major earthquakes have been responsible for the death toll of thousands of people per year in the past decades [4; 14; 28], as well as economic losses that can reach a significant fraction of a country's welfare. The importance of the non-structural components in building performance under seismic action is well recognised in the scientific community, as shown in the previous sections. Furthermore, the damage observed in residential buildings in past earthquakes demonstrated that the damage to non-structural components represents a substantial contribution to the resulting economic losses. Loss estimation methodologies are crucial tools for governments and insurance companies to predict the consequences of earthquakes. Several methods are available in the literature to correlate damage and losses. They assume different procedures to compute the seismic hazard, the building response due to seismic actions and the estimation of economic losses. [PERSON] et al. [36] carried out a preliminary work concerning the correlation of the damage detected by in situ inspections and the repair costs determined according to repair interventions designed and computed by practitioners engaged by owners in a post-earthquake reconstruction process. For that, the authors supported the study in data collected on damaged residential RC buildings after the L'Aquila earthquake (Italy). After the earthquake, teams of seismic engineering teams visited 74,254 buildings with severe, light or no damage. In addition, the teams built a database containing first-level data gathered in a rapid visual inspection, such as the geometrical building characteristics, construction age and renovation, type and damage on structural components (vertical and horizontal structures, roofs, stairs and infill partitions) and non-structural elements. The repair costs of damaged buildings were fully covered by public funds, while different upper bounds were fixed for the costs of strengthening interventions based on building usability rating. For each damaged building, several funding applications for relevant repair (for condomium units, i.e., dwellings) and repair and strengthening (for common areas and structural parts) projects were submitted by owners' engaged practitioners to a proper commission. In that study, the empirical damage on residential buildings was derived through data collected using the AeDES ('Agibilita e Danno nell'Emergenza Sismica, Usability and Damage in Post-Earthquake Emergency') form. The damage level is then divided according to six intensities, namely no damage (null), slight damage (D1), medium-severe damage (D2-D3) and very heavy damage (D4-D5). The AeDES form also reports the damage extension on each structural component, namely if the damage extent is lower than 1/3, between 1/3 and 2/3, and greater than 2/3 of the storey components. The authors found that the most frequent damage in infill partitions was medium-severe (D2-D3), and a large number of observed damages was related to the infills partitions in three types of damage extensions (<1/3 extent, 1/3-2/3 extent and >2/3 extent of the storey components). Very heavy damages were found in masonry infill walls from 418 buildings (28% of the total buildings). The authors also studied the costs related to repair interventions, which consisted of: (a) Repairing of damaged non-structural parts and relevant finishing works; (b) local repair of damaged structural components; (c) demolition and reconstruction of fully damaged or unsafe non-structural or secondary structural elements (i.e., interior or exterior infills, outdoor curtain wall, heavy plasters, fireplaces and chimney-pots, porches, eaves, repair of damaged facilities, etc.).