A multilevel Approach for the Structural Vulnerability Assessment of Historical Water Tunnels. The Case of the Apulian Aqueduct.

The Apulian Aqueduct (South of Italy) is one of the largest in Europe. The so-called ‘Principal Canal’ is its ‘backbone’. Its construction started in 1906 and was completed before the Second World War. Its tunnels in Campania and Basilicata Regions, since the construction, have experienced huge damages. This is why the necessity of a vulnerability assessment according to the present knowledge arises in order to better choose the ‘optimum’ intervention that should also take account of the geometrical and functional peculiarities of these tunnels. In this scenario, taking as an example the case study of the ‘Santa Maria dei Santi’ tunnel of the Principal Canal, the aim of this article is to illustrate the preliminary results of the multilevel approach that the Apulian Aqueduct Society has just started to follow in order to assess the structural vulnerability of this kind of constructions.