Effects of Artificial Landform Change To Water Pipeline Damage in Sendai City During the 2011 Tohoku Offshore Japan Earthquake

Abstract eng:
Sendai City was severely affected by the Mw9.0 Tohoku Offshore Earthquake of March 11th, 2011. A system of 4458-km water supply network in the city had extensive damage, with 1064 locations seriously affected, resulting in cuts off water supply of 2.3 hundred thousand houses just after the earthquake. About 60 percent of locations of the damaged pipelines were found to be located not on low-lying land consisting of soft soils but on hilly residential lands developed by cutting and leveling the hills and then filling the valleys for the past several ten years. In this study, the old topographic maps surveyed before the land development were digitized and normalized for superimposing on locations of pipeline damage to analyze the effects of landform change to pipelines damage. As a result, the followings were reached: more than a half of pipe breaks in the developed areas occurred in the former hillside slope and one third of the breaks occurred in the former valleys in the hill; The heaviest concentration of the pipe breaks observed within the boundary area between cutting and filling with a thickness ranging from -2.5 m to 2.5 m; and the higher concentration of pipe breaks is found in the area of ground failures but the greater numbers of breaks also occurred outside of the areas.

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