Seismic risk assessment at the proposed site of Gemsa wind power station,southwestern coast of Gulf of Suez,Egypt

Gemsa has been chosen as the site for one of a new generation of power stations along the south-western margin of the Gulf of Suez. This site has been affected by a number of destructive earthquakes (M_w> 5), in addition to large number of earthquakes with magnitudes of less than 5. In this study seismic activities in the region were collected and re-evaluated, and the main earthquake prone zones were identified. It is indicated that this site is affected by the southern Gulf of Suez, northern Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba source zones. The southern Gulf of Suez source zone is the nearest to the proposed site. The stochastic simulation method has been applied to estimate the Peak GroundAcceleration at the site of the proposed Gemsa power plant. It was noticed that the pseudo-spectral acceleration (PSA) reaches 175 cm/sec2 resulting from the southern Gulf of Suez seismic source. In addition, the response spectrum was conducted with a damping value of 5% of the critical damping, and the predominant period reached 0.1sec at the site. These results should be taken into consideration by civil engineers and decision-makers for designing earthquake resistant structures.