ASKxELP

Semi-legacy software from 1999 to model the impact of seismic risk on a territory with electric power networks. Source code in FORTRAN and related reports can be downloaded from the earthquake engineering online archive maintained by University of California Berkeley.

ASKxELP: Assessment of Seismic RisK for ELectric Power Networks

Giannini, Renato; Pinto, Paolo E.; Vanzi, Ivo

1999,

ASKxELP is a Fortran computer program which models two different but interacting aspects of the seismic risk on a territory: first, the seismic behavior of an Electric Power Network (EPN), from both the structural and electric viewpoints and, secondly, the expected number of casualties in the municipalities. Interaction is intended in the sense that, electric power being essential for emergency operations (hospitals, telecommunications, emergency management centers, etc.), complete or partial blackout at a point in the affected area increases the time of response for rescue and hospitalization the injured. EPN's are extremely vulnerable lifelines since they contain a large number of pieces of equipment not designed to withstand lateral forces. This equipment is concentrated in the stations, or nodes of the network. Line malfunctions originating from any station may spread to significant parts of the system and cause a larger scale blackout. As a local damage indicator, the number of casualties is used; this computed as the product of the population and the percentage of casualties in the population modeled as a random function of the local earthquake intensity. The program allows: 1. a look at only the network, or only at the casualties within the territory, or at their interaction 2. performing either scenario studies, conditioning the results to seismic events of given magnitude and location, or full reliability studies, considering different sources of randomness (earthquake magnitude and location, attenuation, etc.) 3. analysis of large scale system behavior with synthetic indexes, or behavior at a small scale, with analytical indexes giving detailed territorial information. Synthetic indexes are useful from the network manager's viewpoint whereas analytical indexes are useful from the local community's perspective. Results are output either to a text file or a file post-processed with an external graphic program (PLOTxELP)to show the statistical results in the territory.