Evaluating and Enhancing Seismic Performance of Water Distribution System in Terms of Fire Suppression

Abstract

Urban water distribution system (WDS) plays an important role in post-earthquake fire suppression. A wave of fire outbreaks tends to happen immediately and simultaneously after the main shock, while WDS is highly vulnerable in seismic events and may not be able to provide sufficient water for fire suppression. Several researches have been conducted to evaluate the performance of damaged WDS following seismic events; however, few of them addresses the capacity of WDS for fire suppression by means of providing sufficient water. With this regard, a probabilistic method to evaluate the fire suppression ability of seismically damaged WDS is proposed based on Monte Carlo simulation. In each simulation run, hydraulic analysis is conducted considering the uncertainties associated with pipe failures. Given the retrofit target, the cost efficiency of upgrading each pipe can be calculated based on the simulation result, thus the retrofit sequence can be obtained. A real WDS of a Chinese city is used for illustration, and discussions on its fire suppression capacity following an assuming earthquake are made based on the simulation results.KeywordsSeismic performanceWater distribution networkFire suppressionHydraulic analysis