Urban Planning is one is a key tool to mitigate and recover cities from past damage due to disasters. In earthquake-prone countries like El Salvador, with cities destroyed multiple times by earthquakes, it is now a priority to channel through urban planning proper measures to mitigate and prevent future damage from seismic events, and ensure the safety of population. In order for the measure to respond to the current situation of the cities, a holistic urban seismic risk assessment should be performed, incorporating the socio-economic vulnerability to the physical risk to develop feasible and realistic measures, which the population can develop. Santa Tecla is one of the riskiest cities in El Salvador in terms of seismic risk. With the goal of concluding feasible measures for Santa Tecla to increase its seismic safety, an urban seismic risk analysis was performed to understand the current situation and, based on them and the analysis of similar Japanese cases on disaster management, propose realistic measures to increase seismic safety of the city. Additionally, under the assumption that houses are the most damages structures due to earthquakes, a seismic evaluation and retrofitting analysis and proposal is done to a typical housing models inside Santa Tecla. A simplified seismic evaluation methodology for residents is also proposed in order to promote both evaluation and retrofitting to houses among non-technical population.
Keywords: Santa Tecla - El Salvador, Urban Planning, Earthquake Disaster Mitigation, Housing, Confined Masonry