Seismic risk assessments of water pipelines: a case study for the city of los angeles Water system pipeline network

Abstract

Understanding the system-level risks of an infrastructure network is a critical step in developing a seismically-resilient network. In a complex seismic environment, numerous future earthquakes that have a broad range of magnitude, rupture location, and probability can affect a spatially distributed network and cause drastically different damage severity and service interruption time. Characterizing system-level risks involves the assessments of system damage potentials from all possible future earthquakes probabilistically. This paper shows a case study where system-level damage potentials for the City of Los Angeles water pipeline network were assessed using a stochastic method. The study considers both the distribution of earthquake-induced shaking and ground deformations, and the locations of the pipe network within the areas of varying shaking and ground deformation. System-level damages, including repair costs and repair time, were established at various target probability levels.