Abstract

With global warming water issue is becoming a mean problem in areas of the south hemisphere where raining is decreasing considerably. As a result, preserving such resource is becoming a crucial task facing the authorities. One of the main ways of preservation is making the water pipelines network as safe as possible from any damages involving lose of water around urban areas in particular those situated within areas prone to seismicity. For this purpose, a method to assess the seismic vulnerability of water pipelines was developed and implemented in a Geographical Information System (GIS), allowing larger water supply network to be covered and studied. This method is based on the identification of the parameters that have an influence on the behaviour of pipelines. Each parameter having a coefficient that represent its influence on the behaviour of the structure, the product of these parameters represent the seismic vulnerability of the section pipe under study. As a result, a proposed classification is obtained allowing the determination of a safe section (green colour), an unsafe section (red colour) and an intermediate situation (orange colour). For a proposed application of the method, a case study for a town in suburb of Algiers is presented within this paper. It concerns the town of Blida. The results are given in the following sections.