Assessing Soil Liquefaction Potential for Urban Cities of Kuwait

The increasing frequency of earthquakes in Kuwait raises concerns regarding soil liquefaction. Currently, there is no soil liquefaction potential map for Kuwait, even for soil profiles along coastal shores, where the groundwater table is near the surface. To address this gap, investigations and assessments were carried out and ArcMap 10.8 was used to establish five soil liquefaction hazard potential maps for Kuwait for different earthquake scenarios based on available borehole logs. The popular methods for evaluating soil liquefaction hazard are the simplified approach proposed in the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research workshop, which is based on standard penetration tests (for determining the safety factor), and Luna and Frost's (1998) method to assess the liquefaction potential index. Notably, standard penetration test blows were used to investigate the variations in the soil relative density below the surface, describe seismic sources, and estimate peak ground accelerations (calculated using Cornell's equation and verified using ground-motion models). Southern Kuwait was highly vulnerable to soil liquefaction potential (local earthquake moment magnitude of 5.5); this was confirmed by the documented structural damage. Such maps can be used to identify the areas vulnerable to soil liquefaction and limit the risk to infrastructure.