The Role of Rockfall Protection Barriers in the Context of Risk Mitigation: The Case of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano

Rockfall risk management has now to face the presence of several falling rock protection works, which have been installed, over the last two decades, along the areas interested by rockfall events and results now in a wide and varied scenario of countermeasures. Procedure for the evaluation of rockfall risk assessment should reasonably apply to such scenario, suitably characterized to obtain reliable results. Within the context the Autonomous Province of Bolzano (PAB) has developed a procedure for rockfall risk assessment which considers the influence of the existing protection structures on the natural slope hazard. The study described in this paper the issue with reference to falling rock protection barriers, metallic structures designed to intercept and stop blocks trajectories in a rockfall event. The structural analyses is carried out so that the result could be interpreted within the PAB’s rockfall risk assessment procedure.