Abstract
Earthquakes pose a great risk to railway systems and services around the world. In China alone, earthquakes caused 88 rail service disruptions between 2012 and 2019. Here, we present a first-of-its-kind methodology to analyze the seismic risk of a railway system using an empirically derived train service fragility curve. We demonstrate our methodology using the Chinese railway system. In doing so, we generate a set of stochastic earthquake scenarios for China based on a national-scale seismicity model. Using disruption records, we construct an empirically grounded fragility curve that relates the failure probability of train services to peak ground acceleration. By combining the simulated earthquakes, the fragility curve, and empirical train flow data from 2016, we quantitatively assess the seismic impact and the risk faced by the Chinese railway system. The maximum train trip loss could reach 2400 trips in response to a single seismic event, accounting for 34% of the national daily train trips. Due to the spatially uneven daily train flow and seismicity distribution, the seismic impact on the railway system in different seismic zones is highly heterogeneous and does not always increase when the hazard intensity increases. More specifically, the results show that the railway lines located in the Qinghai-Tibet and Xinjiang seismic zones exhibit the highest risk. The generated impact curves and the risk map provide a basis for railway planning and risk management decisions.
Highlights
Earthquakes cause major damage to railway infrastructure and can result in large disruptions of railway services
We first investigate the impact of earthquakes with different magnitudes in different seismic zones, identify the risk hotspots, and quantify the risk of the Chinese railway system
Our results reveal the importance of integrating hazard intensity, local network topology, and the spatial distribution of train flow, and the spatial coupling of the two when performing a seismic impact analysis
Summary
Earthquakes cause major damage to railway infrastructure and can result in large disruptions of railway services. The Ms 8.0 Wenchuan Earthquake on 12 May 2008 caused up to USD 10.2 billion in direct economic damage to transport infrastructure and a disruption of 12 days on the Baocheng Line (UNCRD 2008). An example of no direct physical damage is the Ms 5.8 earthquake that hit Changning County, China, on 17 and 18 June 2019. In China alone, over 88 rail service disruptions induced by earthquakes were reported from 2012 to 2019. In these disruptive events, less than 10% of the earthquakes caused physical damage to the railway system. To ensure safe operation and effective maintenance of railway infrastructure systems, it is both urgent and necessary to assess the seismic impact on train services and to identify railway lines with a high risk of seismicity-induced service disruptions
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