Bull Earthquake Eng (2014) 12:807–827 DOI 10.1007/s10518-013-9523-7 ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER Vulnerability assessment of reinforced concrete bridge structures in Algiers using scenario earthquakes Abderrahmane Kibboua · Hakim Bechtoula · Youcef Mehani · Mounir Naili Received: 5 April 2013 / Accepted: 16 September 2013 / Published online: 25 September 2013 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract Algeria has an inheritance of more than 11,000 bridges, with approximately 5,000 road bridges of which more than 30 % have a high probability to be exposed to major earth- quakes and serious damages in the future. Therefore, it is of great importance to retrofit the existing bridges and assess their seismic vulnerability and set a permanent monitoring survey to follow the change of their dynamic characteristics such as natural frequency and modal damping. The assessment of the seismic vulnerability of existing RC bridges was carried out based on the consistent and complete post earthquake survey after the Boumerdes earthquake. The information on the damaged existing RC bridges was investigated and eval- uated by the authors. This paper presents a simple and efficient inspection method for the preliminary evaluation of the seismic vulnerability of existing bridge structures. To assess the seismic damage of 148 existing bridges, two seismic scenarios were carried out using “Khair al Din” and the “Zemmouri” faults that are capable to generate earthquakes with a maximum acceleration of 0.8g. The main findings of this study are summarized in this paper. Keywords Existing RC bridges · Seismic vulnerability assessment · Post seismic inspection · Seismic scenarios · Seismic damage A. Kibboua (B ) · H. Bechtoula · Y. Mehani · M. Naili National Earthquake Engineering Research Center, CGS, 01, Rue Kaddour RAHIM, BP 252, Hussein Dey, Alger, Algeria e-mail: akibboua@cgs-dz.org H. Bechtoula e-mail: hbechtoula@cgs-dz.org Y. Mehani e-mail: ymehani@cgs-dz.org M. Naili e-mail: mnaili@cgs-dz.org 123