Lifelines play a crucial and essential role in human life and in economic development. The resilience of those systems under extreme events as earthquakes is a primary requirement, especially when large amount of toxic and flammable material are transported. In this work, the seismic vulnerability of buried gas and liquid pipelines has been analyzed, starting from a large number of damage data to pipelines collected from post-earthquake reconnaissance reports. Seismic fragility formulations and threshold values for the earthquake intensity with respect to the release of content from different types of pipelines have been derived. The main outcome of the work is therefore a novel seismic assessment tool which is able to cover the needs of industrial risk assessment procedures and land use planning requirements. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.