The electric power markets have imposed new power service quality that makes fault location in power distribution systems a compulsory issue. This paper presents a new fault detection and location approach using the well known EMTP software. The simulated data is then analyzed using advanced signal processing technique based on wavelet analysis to extract useful information form signals and this is then applied to the artificial neural networks (ANNs) for locating series faults in a practical underground distribution system. The paper concludes by comprehensively evaluation the performance of the technique developed in the case of series faults. The results indicate that the fault location technique has an acceptable accuracy under a whole variety of fault incidence angle , type of fault , load taps with different types of load and cable length.