The California Energy Commission has awarded a $3.5 million research contract to UCLA to study the dangers posed by earthquakes to the state’s natural gas infrastructure.
The three-year research project will quantify risk to natural gas storage structures and pipelines from earthquakes and their associated hazards including landslides, fault-displacement and liquefaction of soils.
The project is coordinated by the Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3), a multidisciplinary and multi-campus research center headquartered at the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences, which is part of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.
“The safety and reliability of California’s natural gas infrastructure is essential to how the state’s communities respond during and after a major seismic event,” said Yousef Bozorgnia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA and the project’s principal investigator. “Ideally, we need to be as resilient as possible and to do so, we need to know the specific risks posed by earthquakes, and then how best to mitigate them.”
“The challenging goals of this project require a diverse range of expertise, and we’ve assembled a very strong team from both academia and practitioners,” said Ali Mosleh, director of the Garrick Risk Institute and UCLA’s Evalyn Knight Professor in Engineering. “In the big picture, we want California to bounce back as quickly as possible following natural hazards that are inevitable and this project can help toward that goal.”
The project team includes experts from UCLA, Caltech, the Southern California Earthquake Center, the University of Texas at Austin, and engineers and scientists in private practice.
For more information about the project and its progress please visit: https://www.risksciences.ucla.edu/cec-main-project-page