Earthquake and earth movement monitoring: The possibility to use Natural Gas distribution infrastructure

The recent earthquake occurred in central Italy (Magnitude of 6.5) has caused lot of deaths and injuries and several damages to buildings and other infrastructures. As for previous events (L’Aquila in the 2009 and Emilia Romagna in the 2012) experts agree that monitoring should be performed to control earth movement and to be able to identify dangerous situations. “Casa Italia” national program foresees large investments to improve prevention against earthquake events. The installation of monitoring devices on buried pipelines is proposed in the paper as a possible solution for earthquakes and, more in general, earth movements; in fact, a high density of buried pipelines is present in the territory so pipeline monitoring coincides also to ground condition control. The solution shown in the paper ensures the respect of two primary objectives: i) the control of lifelines condition to define cost – effective maintenance programs and ii) the monitoring of earth movement to ensure the execution of emergency plans. The paper is divided into two parts: in the first one a review of hazard and of interactions between buried pipelines and soil is presented; in the second part requirements and possible critical issues for the implementation of monitoring devices are presented.