The California High-Speed Rail Authority has awarded a three-year grant to UCLA to create a database of earthquake fault displacements and develop a predictive model to estimate the fault displacements. The project is a multidisciplinary research effort to be undertaken by the Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3), a multi-campus research center headquartered at the Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.
“This project is particularly important because it has broad application to major lifeline infrastructures, such as transportation systems, water and natural gas facilities that are at or near earthquake faults,” said Yousef Bozorgnia, the Earthquake Fault Displacement Hazard Initiative’s principal investigator and a professor of civil and environmental engineering.
The researchers will develop a database of fault displacement to record how much land on either side of a fault has moved relative to one another. The team will also create a probabilistic predictive model of fault displacement.
“California High-Speed Rail is the largest infrastructure project in the United States, and we are delighted to be an important player to help quantify its seismic resiliency,” said Ali Mosleh, director of Garrick Risk Institute and UCLA’s Evalyn Knight Professor of Engineering.
The various tasks of the overall initiative are co-sponsored by the High-Speed Rail Authority, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the California Energy Commission, California Department of Transportation and the Southern California Gas Company.
For more information about the project and its progress please visit: https://www.risksciences.ucla.edu/nhr3/fdhi/home