‘Earthquake engineering is my life’: How UCLA experts are helping build disaster resilience in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) operates one of the most important infrastructure networks in Southern California, providing water and electricity to more than four million residents. This makes LADWP the largest municipal utility in the country. In a region where seismic events are a fact of life, ensuring that this infrastructure can withstand earthquakes is essential to the security and safety of this population.

Through a long-standing partnership between UCLA and LADWP, researchers across the university are helping the community improve the resiliency of its critical infrastructure so Angelenos can continue to access water and energy, even in emergency situations.

A key contributor to this effort is researcher Yusef Bozorgnia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering and an internationally recognized expert in earthquake engineering.

His work focuses on how earthquakes affect the built environment, studying the characteristics of earthquake motion itself and how infrastructure performs during major seismic events.

Bozorgnia approaches his work with passion: “Earthquake engineering is my life. It is not just a business.” This commitment is reflected in the depth of his work over the past decades.

Because his research helps make decisions about the infrastructure on which millions of people depend, Bozorgnia works extensively with utilities, government agencies, national laboratories, private industry, and researchers from other universities. With the support of many partners, his team is able to implement large-scale projects that improve understanding of seismic risk throughout California and beyond.

He also feels that the critical importance of this work requires a lot of collaboration. “We just want to make sure all the key experts in the community are involved…,” he said. The amount of work requires it.

Through its relationship with UCLA, LADWP can leverage Bozorgnia’s decades of experience to achieve shared goals. Rather than relying on one-off studies, LADWP gains deep and ongoing access to research developed and refined over the life of the work.

Save taxpayer money by rightsizing infrastructure investments

Drawing on huge data sets from around the world and decades of work, Bozorgnia and colleagues from inside and outside UCLA have developed models that help predict how faults will move during earthquakes. Up to 90% of the water used in Los Angeles comes from outside the city. This means that ensuring these pipelines are built to withstand – or at least avoid catastrophic damage during – seismic events is essential to preventing catastrophic loss of water access in the wake of earthquakes.

Bozorgnia and his team at UCLA are helping to provide LADWP engineers with a clear understanding of which aspects of the city’s complex water system are most at risk in the event of a major earthquake, and which are most resilient: information that can be used to inform strategic upgrades, upgrades and other important investments.

This allows LADWP to right-size its capital improvement investments and avoid overbuilding, which means avoiding costs that will be passed on to taxpayers.

Keeping Los Angeles connected, even in disasters

Youssef and his team have several projects with LADWP.

He is currently examining the Elizabeth Tunnel, an important component of Los Angeles’ water delivery system. It also crosses the notorious San Andreas Fault, making it particularly vulnerable to seismic activity.

He is also looking into large water transmission pipelines in the San Fernando Valley, which move large amounts of water through the city.

In another effort, he and his team collaborated with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and used seismic vibration simulations to analyze the seismic performance of transmission pipelines embedded in soil.

These studies work together to provide LADWP with a clearer picture of seismic risk across many different scenarios in its water delivery system. Facility planners can access research-backed models to understand which components are most at risk, what resiliency plans are effective, and where they are needed most.

Earthquake protection in Los Angeles and beyond

The relationship works. “We enjoyed working with them on real-world problems, and they enjoyed our collaboration,” Bozorgnia said.

Most importantly, the impacts of this work can help beyond the borders of Los Angeles.

Bozorgnia’s work is one of 28 projects supported through UCLA’s partnership with LADWP, many of which are led by researchers affiliated with the UCLA Institute for the Environment and Sustainability.

As LADWP continues to plan for the future, collaborations like these – enabled through this partnership – ensure that the best available research contributes to impactful decisions that impact people’s lives.

Learn more about UCLA’s long-standing partnership with LADWP.

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