Seismic vulnerability of gas and liquid buried pipelines

•The seismic vulnerability of buried gas and liquid pipelines is analyzed.•Damage states and risk states are defined.•Fragility functions for the vulnerability of pipelines are given.•Probit functions for the analysis of damage with respect to the seismic intensity are given.•Seismic threshold values for risk assessment and gas distribution are shown.

Lifelines play a crucial and essential role in human life and in economic development. The resilience of those systems under extreme events as earthquakes is a primary requirement, especially when large amount of toxic and flammable material are transported.In this work, the seismic vulnerability of buried gas and liquid pipelines has been analyzed, starting from a large number of damage data to pipelines collected from post-earthquake reconnaissance reports.Seismic fragility formulations and threshold values for the earthquake intensity with respect to the release of content from different types of pipelines have been derived. The main outcome of the work is therefore a novel seismic assessment tool which is able to cover the needs of industrial risk assessment procedures and land use planning requirements.