California Energy Commission Awards $3.5 Million Research Grant On Seismic Risks To The Natural Gas Infrastructure To The UCLA Garrick Institute For The Risk Sciences

The California Energy Commission recently awarded a $3.5 million research contract to UCLA to study seismic risk 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 earthquake ground motion, fault displacement, liquefaction of soils, and landslides.

The research project is a multidisciplinary research initiative coordinated by the Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3, https://www.risksciences.ucla.edu/nhr3 ). NHR3 is a multidisciplinary and multi-campus research center with headquarters at the Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences, UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

“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,” states Yousef Bozorgnia, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering 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,” states Ali Mosleh, Director of the Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences and UCLA’s Evalyn Knight Chair 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 (SCEC), the University of Texas at Austin, and numerous world-class practicing engineers and scientists. For more information about the project and its progress please visit: https://www.risksciences.ucla.edu/cec-main-project-page.