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Available fire risk assessment approaches are mostly developed for new buildings. These approaches encompass minimum provisions defined by standards that are valid in certain countries, and few of these methods were thought exclusively for assessing the fire safety of cultural heritage. Given the diversity and specificity of cultural heritage assets, simple approaches are thus required to analyse their fire safety and establish their risk mitigation needs. In this context, a simplified fire damage index dedicated to assessing the fire vulnerability of immovable cultural heritage assets is proposed. The proposed index is the result of a weighted multi-parameter evaluation that can be correlated with the level of damage that the cultural heritage asset (including its contents) is expected to suffer under a fire. The proposed index involves twenty-one indicators divided into four categories and offers a flexible approach for universal applicability. The performance of the proposed approach is illustrated for two case studies in Portugal. The results highlight the advantages of having a simple methodology that can be used for the preliminary risk analysis of a large number of assets to identify those requiring risk mitigation measures or detailed and resource-demanding analyses.

Given the continuous development and availability of strong-motion databases containing real accelerograms, the consideration of such information in nonlinear structural analysis becomes increasingly attractive. However, the selection of records to adopt in structural analysis requires not only the consideration of consistent selection criteria but also the availability of computational tools that allow for fast and efficient searches of earthquake records within such databases. In this context, and following the recent advances in internet-based technologies, the present paper introduces SelEQ, a web-based application for the search and selection of earthquake records. This tool incorporates a number of filtering procedures allowing for the search of seismic records based on geophysical data but also on more advanced criteria such as spectral shape matching. Furthermore, SelEQ allows also the selection of earthquake records according to current seismic design code requirements, such as those of Eurocode 8, which demand for record suites compatible with a given response spectrum.