Fault displacement hazard from the asset owner’s perspective

Christopher M. Madugo, Stephen Thompson, & Ozgur Kozaci

Published August 6, 2020, SCEC Contribution #10280, 2020 SCEC Annual Meeting Talk on TBD

The expansive footprint of distributed infrastructure such as pipelines, canals and transportation corridors makes these assets vulnerable to fault displacement hazard in tectonically active regions like California. In the last decade, fault rupture from the 2014 Mw 6.0 Napa and 2019 Mw 6.4 and 7.1 Ridgecrest earthquakes crossed high pressure natural gas lines owned by PG&E. Using examples from the Ridgecrest earthquakes, we highlight fault source and surface displacement parameters that have the greatest potential to impact the performance of linear infrastructure such as gas pipelines, and how displacement hazard is typically analyzed using current models and methods. Hypothetical examples are then used to highlight the largest uncertainties in current models and their limitations. Some of these limitations are related to issues such as conditional probability of displacement at a specific location on or away from the mapped primary fault, how to partition net displacement between multiple principal fault strands with different senses of slip, and how to incorporate site geology information in the modeling of net and distributed fault displacement hazard. While ongoing efforts to develop new fault displacement databases and next generation fault displacement models will improve our capabilities to address hazard, several issues that have a high impact on hazard and hazard uncertainty still lack supporting data and analysis and will hopefully be addressed in future research.

Key Words
fault displacement hazard

Citation
Madugo, C. M., Thompson, S., & Kozaci, O. (2020, 08). Fault displacement hazard from the asset owner’s perspective. Oral Presentation at 2020 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Earthquake Geology