Seismic Damage Estimation in Buried Pipelines Due to Future Earthquakes – The Case of the Mexico City Water System

Since the mid-70s, there have been advances in the development of models to better understand how earthquakes affect buried pipelines. These natural events can cause damage due to two phenomena: seismic wave propagation and permanent ground deformation. The combined effect of both phenomena in pipeline damage estimation is a subject still complex to address, especially if the objective is to estimate damage due to future earthquakes. In this chapter, the damage assessment methods only consider the impact of seismic wave propagation. The effects of permanent ground deformation phenomena, like ground subsidence, landslides, and ground rupture, are omitted. The exceptional damage caused by the 1985 Michoacan earthquake in Mexico City has encouraged researchers to develop sophisticated tools to estimate ground motion in the Valley of Mexico from Pacific coastal earthquakes, including the important site effects largely observed in the city. These tools have helped to better understand how earthquakes affect buildings and other structures like pipeline systems. The most remarkably case of pipeline damage caused by the 1985 seismic event is the extensive damage suffered by the Mexico City Water System (MCWS) that left almost 3.5 million people without water, and caused water service disruptions over a period of two months. The 1985 MCWS damage scenario has been extensively analyzed for developing models to better understand how seismic wave propagation affects buried pipelines; some of those models are employed in the future damage prediction methods described in this manuscript. Fragility functions are typically the tools most used to assess seismic damage in buried pipelines. These functions relate pipeline damage with seismic intensity. Pipeline damage is generally expressed as a linear pipe repair density. Seismic intensity is usually quantified through a seismic parameter. There are many seismic parameters used as arguments of fragility functions; the most important of these are described in Section 2. Section 3 describes the most important fragility functions proposed until now, including the two employed in the seismic damage estimation for the MCWS presented in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 contains a summary of the most important conclusions of this work.