A particular place affected by some earthquake, where some level of severity of shaking is typical of what was experienced. This entails, firstly, that the settlement is large enough for a statistically significant sample to be obtained, without being unduly affected by small-scale local peculiarities, and secondly, that it is not so large that genuine local variations are not blurred over. Intensity should not be assigned to a single building or street; neither should a single intensity be assigned to a metropolis or a county. In general circumstances, the smallest place should be no smaller than a village, and the largest no larger than a moderately-sized European town. Thus it is reasonable to assign a single intensity value to, say, Piraeus, but not to the whole of modern Athens. No rigid rules will be stated, since individual circumstances will influence the user in the decisions he makes in particular cases. It is also desirable to assign intensity values to locations which are reasonably homogeneous, especially with regard to soil types, otherwise the range of shaking effects reported may be very large. However, this is not always practicable, depending on the precision in the data and how they were gathered. In the case where a town has areas in which the geotechnical conditions are very different (for instance, one half might be on an alluvial bank but the other on a plateau) then different intensity values should be assessed for the two parts of the town independently.
to do
epos
macroseismic place
Lieu macrosismique
Sismologie