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Modeling and simulation are important tools in the study of power distribution faults due to the limited amount of actual data and the high cost of experimentation. Although a number of software packages are available to simulate the electrical signals, approaches for simulating fault events in different environments have not been well developed. In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling and simulating fault events in power distribution systems based on environmental factors and the cause-effect relationships among them. The spatial and temporal aspects of significant environmental factors leading to various faults are modeled as raster maps and probability functions, respectively. The cause-effect relationships are expressed as fuzzy rules and a hierarchical fuzzy inference system is built to infer the probability of faults in the simulated environments. A test case simulating a part of a typical city's power distribution systems demonstrates the effectiveness of the framework in generating realistic distribution faults. This work is helpful in fault diagnosis for different local systems and provides a configurable data source to other researchers and engineers in similar areas as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]