I received my first and, as yet, only earthquake warning on my smart phone this past September for a 4.3 earthquake here in Southern California.
It was an interesting fleeting experience. I was sitting on the couch, phone in hand, when it emitted an unusual fairly obnoxious noise. I glanced at the screen, saw the words earthquake and 4 something, and understood what was being conveyed sort of inchoately without making it explicit sense of it. My wife was sitting next to me reading so I turned to her and tried to show it to her but she remained absorbed in her reading.
Then the room jolted, rocked a little, and settled. The nice thing about the alert is I remained relaxed the whole time. Because the alert indicated the magnitude, I wasn't too worried about damage or personal injury.
Now if it had warned of a larger earthquake, like a 5 or 6, I imagine I would have been more panicked. Still, the warning would have been even more valuable in that case.
It was one of the more acute "Now this feels like living in the future" moments I've had recently.
I was once in my old Tokyo apartment on the 12th floor. I use an early earthquake warning app. It buzzed, telling me a 9.0 occurred in Tokyo bay and I have approximately 3 seconds before the very extreme shaking starts. I just sat down and thought "welp I'm dead".
It turned out to be a false alarm, triggered by something like a monitoring station being struck by lightning. I still have the screenshot of what the app looked like when it told me.
Yikes, that reminds me of the false ’we are all going to be bombed soon, this is not a test’ warning the people in Hawaii got… there should be penalties for false alarms like this.
In many cases there is some opportunity to validate information before it goes out. In others ... not so much.
Even a missile-launch alarm would typically have some opportunity to be assessed based on alert values (e.g., increasing or decreasing hostilities), and perhaps multiple sensor systems (boost-phase IR tracks plus radar signatures, known planned non-military launches, etc.).
In the case of earthquakes, their very unpredictability, the brief period of time avialable in which to make an alert (often only a few seconds, in cases a few minutes) means that manual cross-validation is all but impossible. Still, checks across multiple seismic detectors, preferably isolated from one another to the maximum extent possible, would be one potential check, though you'd still need to have multiple sensors relatively close together, as the time of propagation of seismic waves is both what provides the early alert and causes the damage. (Relative speeds of P (primary) and S (secondary) waves helps --- the p waves tend to cause less damage, but provide an earlier alert, the s waves arrive more slowly but do most of the damage.
At the surface, speed differential is about 3 km/s, meaning there's roughly 1 second of arrival differential for each 3km the observer is from the epicentre. (Subsurface waves travel faster.) Each 3km of separation of seismic stations costs 1 second of advanced warning time, plus whatever system logic and response times exist.
But given that major earthquakes can occur suddenly and without warning or pre-shocks, you really do pretty much have to be ready for anything at any time. And alerting systems need to take this into account. One option might be to have the logic on the phone itself --- it would trigger an alert, but only if some number of independent alarms were detected. One would be unlikely to trigger a false alarm, but two or three near-simultaneous alerts would indicate a major quake.
Penalising false alarms is probably the wrong approach. An engineering philosophy, of determining paths to either false positives or false negatives (each of which have high impact), and eliminating those.
> In the case of earthquakes, their very unpredictability, the brief period of time avialable in which to make an alert (often only a few seconds, in cases a few minutes) means that manual cross-validation is all but impossible.
For the earthquake alarm there is absolutely no manual intervention. These are automatic alarms exploiting the fact that the speed of light in air is faster than the speed of sound in rock. Earthquakes move approximately 1km/s, so if you are 3km away from the epicenter, you get a maximum of 3 seconds warning. Throw a human in the loop and there's no way they'd respond fast enough.
Often these false alarm incidents occur due to issues with the "last mile" of the system in the US, which might be substantially alleviated if there was a federal effort to get automation in place. In a nuclear strike, for example, NORAD would issue the alarm ("attack warning") via FEMA NAWAS and EAS after several documented and proceduralised validation steps.
The problem is that after FEMA NAWAS delivers the alert (audibly) to state and local EOCs, the next step is a ???. In those areas that do have some type of state or locally operated warning system, it's usually just some staff member pushing a button... and the button pushing is where mistakes can and do get made. In theory IPAWS and CAP will introduce automation at this step, but there's a lot of issues that have made CAP implementation slow, mainly the budgetary limitations of local governments and the fact that the major IPAWS/CAP software vendors expect very high prices.
Obviously in the case of earthquake warnings the options for manual validation are very limited due to the time constraints... but in general false-positive incidents have come from fat fingering, not misidentification by technical systems. There are good opportunities to put safeguards in place for automated systems to reduce false positives. For example (although I believe this is partly manual), as I understand it the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center will not issue a full warning until multiple data buoys have indicated a tsunami wave. That doesn't guarantee that it will be of damaging proportions once it reaches our coasts due to the vagaries of ocean modeling (i.e. in the case of the major Japanese earthquake in which a tsunami did occur but was quite small by the time it reached Hawaii, so the warnings felt a bit silly), but it does ensure that it's not an outright false positive.
My point is that more broadly false alarms a failures to alarm must be individually reviewed and cause for failure identified. Assuming that all more most failures are last-mile will work ... until it doesn't. Reviewing and demonstrating that the failure was or was not "last-mile" is what's required.
False signal, improper sensor detection, bad comms (generating or inhibiting signal), bad processing, confusing training or testing events for actual, having an actual alert during a test or drill, and errors in broadcasting alerts to the general public and/or the response to those alerts, might all be components to assess. "Last mile" concerns that last stage.
Since it's one that's often outside the core of an alerting system, and may involve many independent entities (people and/or organisations), it is likely to malfunction. Streamlining procedures and drilling frequently will help identify any such issues and iron them out.
Note that though tsunamis move quickly (> 800 kph / 500 mph in open ocean), the fact that they are often travelling immense distances (100s or 1,000s of miles or km) means that there are almost always many minutes, and quite often many hours for alerts to be sent and responded to. Earthquakes afford seconds to minutes, the timeframes are nearly two orders of magnitude less.
It's not clear who should be blamed for the Hawaii event, except for general government incompetence. It was a planned drill, but the exact time of the drill was purposefully not communicated to the team which handles the alert, to see how they respond. The manager of that team read out the alert text and concluded with: "This is not a drill. This is not a drill. This is not a drill."
The guy whose responsibility to push out the alert had to make a split-second decision. He knew there was a drill happening sometime that day, but his boss said (three times!) that this was not the drill. Better safe than sorry: he pushes the button. I can't really fault him.
Arguably the boss-man should face the repercussions for saying it wasn't a drill when it was, but then that's also kinda the point of the drill--to see how the team would handle a "live" situation. Maybe their interface should have been mocked or the actual alert disabled right before the drill, unbeknownst to them? So it is the drill planners that are responsible?
It's really hard to nail down an individual at fault here, rather than general bureaucratic incompetence.
I have a friend who was stationed in Hawaii during that alarm. He is fairly high up in naval ranking.
We met through an extreme sport hobby in which there are personal speed records to set, and setting those past a certain point are quite dangerous to ones body/life. He and I were both past said point back then.
He was living alone at the time and was woken up by the alert. Through his mind went “either this is a false alarm, or I am completely fucking dead and there’s nothing I can do about it”
Did absolutely nothing except put on his gear & went out and set a new speed record far into the “one fuckup and you’re severely injured or dead category”
I don't know, but my guess would be "free soloing". Basically, climbing up a rock face with no safety equipment. Enthusiasts keep track of speed records for popular climbs. Records are often proven with personal gopro footage, eye witness, etc.
I wonder what 'personal' means in his context though. A lot of the big speed runs, el cap, that face in squamish, are pretty established and not a super personal experience, like say picking your favorite one pitch and doing it.
But I am shocked at how many climbers I know who free solo more than 40 feet off the deck...
Close. Custom built electric skateboards. If I say much more I’ll doxx myself (pretty much already have on this account, oh well, drgaf)
At the time I believe he hit 47mph on flat land with completely smooth pavement. As a community we’ve now hit 54mph clocked on an actual speed radar uphill, slightly above 54mph uphill on GPS (but we don’t brag about GPS readings - while they’ve often been spot on, we’ll always say +/-2mph for them), 67 mph on flat land…
Uphill was on custom poured rubber tires. 67mph flat land was on store available urethane wheels. Keep in mind that’s all electric with no energy from an initial downhill start.
We’ve skated with three of the four downhill record holders of 90mph+… they’re fucking insane in general, & the first time we put one on a custom eboard he hit 44mph flat land & stable with ease (steez)
On the note of danger… we’ve had somebody die from a 14mph flat land crash… yet my friend completely walked away from a 47mph crash wearing only a helmet and tumbling 360* four times… crashes over 40-45 mph in general get pretty fucking gnarly, I’ve seen a few people become seriously disabled or have to completely leave the sport from one, & all of the top dudes of the community wear full leather & more now that they’re pushing past 50mph.
It’s definitely fun stuff. There are some speeds you just shouldn’t be going on a plank of wood. As for me, I’ve clocked 48mph flat land on gps, 45 on radar speed trap. I got into the low 40’s roughly three months in to the hobby, but going past that is not particularly something I’m focused on at this point in my life. Over 45 mph on anything but perfectly smooth road (aka not often) gets to be genuinely scary & induces hardcore tunnel vision. Uphill & flat land is so much different than downhill. A speed wobble @ 38mph steep uphill may have genuinely been the scariest experience in my life, & I’ve had a gun in my face.
If I had to warrant a guess I'm gonna say it's wingsuit flying. I can imagine his friend living at the top of a mountain putting on his squirrel suit to get one last glimpse of Hawaii before shit hits the fan.
The problem is that if the frequency of false alarm is high enough, people ignore the real ones. There is also a problem where the alarm causes harm or causes people to unintentionally become harmed.
In Poland, it was common to use alarm sirens on the occasion of national holidays, even the less important ones. I was so used to meaningless alarm signals that hearing one was making me wonder what anniversary it was, instead of thinking about the potential dangers.
I'm not sure if it was a nationwide problem – voivodes (provincial govenors) could arbitrarily decide on the use of such a signal to commemorate important events. Maybe it changed since then.
I have extended family members who are employees of Hawaii's State Government. The stories they tell... Let me just say that the sheer incompetence and horrible systems design people claim are responsible for that day are entirely reasonable.
The heart of the problem is that government jobs are extremely lucrative for the people of Hawaii because they pay well and because it is extraordinarily difficult to get fired from one. While direct nepotism isn't common, everyone is basically part of this giant extended family. Knowing the right person can land you one of these jobs-for-life even if you're barely qualified for it. There is also a culture of not rocking the boat. Trying to get freeloaders fired subjects you to ostracism. So what ends up happening is a few people end up doing the majority of the work. While this isn't unique to Hawaii, those people who are actually productive end up following their own version of 'the process' and the result is that people are rarely sure if what they are told to do is really what they should be doing.
I would like to submit this as supporting evidence: "A password for the Hawaii emergency agency was hiding in a public photo, written on a post-it note"
I seen too many times when something is made by someone who understands what the system does but never thinks what a rank beginner who is suddenly facing the same display going to think.
It is hard to remember what it is like for someone new to a system.
I got goosebumps reading your post and seeing the screenshot. I used to live in a seismic active region and experienced a few 6.0 and understand that a 9.0 is an end of the world event.
Most you weren't alive then but Alaska had a 9.2 earthquake in 1964. I well remember the news accounts. Luckily not that many people lived in Alaska at the time. I cannot imagine if a quake of that magnitude hit modern day San Francisco.
"9.0 and greater. At or near total destruction – severe damage or collapse to all buildings. Heavy damage and shaking extends to distant locations. Permanent changes in ground topography. One per 10 to 50 years."
I've got no idea at what magnitude I should start worrying. I would assume, and hope, that if my phone (which is otherwise on silent) is blaring, it must be a big deal. Maybe for some people a 4.3 is a big deal, but not for all...
I think that although (estimated) magnitude is helpful, Japan's system also calculates the (estimated) intensity from the earthquake for your local area. Not always correct (but this tends to be rare), but usually within +/-1 of the Shindo scale (which is their local intensity scaling). Seems that ShakeAlert doesn't compute (yet, hopefully) the estimated intensity in your area.
This isn't my experience at all and I've lived in the Bay Area nearly half my life. I have a vague idea of what a mag 4 earthquake feels like, and that's about it.
Yeah that makes sense, people talk about what magnitude x "feels" like, but they're really describing an earthquakes intensity rather than magnitude. You don't directly "feel" the magnitude.
Any given magnitude quake is going to feel very different for people in different situations - eg how far away, how deep, soil conditions, how tall the building they are in etc...
Magnitude is related to how much energy is released - useful for seismologists and records, while intensity is related to ground acceleration and subjective effects which is useful for structural engineers and the public caught in one.
eg that 6.2 magnitude Christchurch quake mentioned elsewhere still managed to produce some of the highest ever recorded vertical ground accelerations despite releasing a tiny fraction of what a really big quake can do.
This depends greatly on building codes, structure contents, and local geology.
In California and Japan, decades of stringent building codes mean that most structures are likely to be safe agaist even large quakes, in the sense that occupants should survive, even if the structure itself is not repairable.
Along the central and eastern US, and in large parts of rural China, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, amongst other areas, building codes, geology, and general preparadness and awareness (or lack) can make even comparatively small quakes deadly.
From the Rockies east, the US is underlayed by largely-intact limestone and a thick crust which can propagate seere ground movement hundreds of kilometers, up to 1,000 km or more. By comparison, along th USwest coast, being 100--200 km from an epicentre usually renders even a large quake largely harmless (though it may still be felt). Additionally, construction standards in the central/eastern US and other regions mentioned above tend to result in far more severe structural damage. Rescue, aid, and shelter capabilities may also be limited.
(In California, the principle geological hazard is fill or other soils prone to liquefaction, which can greatly amplify movement locally. Landslides may also be a concern. In mountains, rockslides.)
The guidelines 323 gives are useful for California and Japan. Elsewhere, comparable damage might occur a magnitude below those given.
Here in Ontario we had a small quake caused by a rock slide in Lake Ontario, almost no damage was seen. But my friend in Bowmanville said her grand mother lost tens of thousands of dollars in custom plates that she has displayed on ledges all around her house.
Why? Because we never get earthquakes here, so there were no lifted edges or holders! Then suddenly we get a small quake, and they all came crashing down.
Christchurch, New Zealand was smashed by a 6.2. Pretty much as you say, older and poorly designed building didn’t fare well, and the earlier 7.2 earthquake wouldn’t have helped. It was a very shallow earthquake too.
The strike slip fault system in most of California can produce earthquakes up to about 8.0. Subduction zone earthquakes that occur in many places, like Northern California up to Alaska, Chile, Japan, etc, can produce 9+ earthquakes. 10 and above only occur during large impact events. So California can have buildings "earthquake proofed" for much lower cost than say Seattle and they come at higher frequency. That may be one of the reasons that California's infrastructure is pretty well prepared for coming earthquakes while Seattle will have major damage when the next 9.0 hits in 0-400 years.
The most dangerous fault line in Seattle, both in terms of earthquake and tsunami risk, is the eponymous system of shallow thrust faults[0] that run through the middle of the city and historically have produced ~7.0 earthquakes.
Seattle buildings built in the last 3 decades are explicitly designed to survive extreme earthquakes. Most of the risk is in the 1970s and earlier infrastructure, quite a lot of which has been torn down to make room for the massive growth of Seattle.
There’s also a healthy local trade in earthquake retrofitting. After the nisqually quake the city got pretty serious, a lot of old buildings downtown were severely damaged
The modern building codes are derived from a 9.0 subduction zone model. I've heard people say that building standards derived from this model should work for just about any type of earthquake up to around 8.0-8.5 even if not specifically modeled; I have no idea how true that is but it seems plausible. Building codes are not defined just by the strength of the earthquake but also the earthquake type, depth, soil etc. It isn't the strength that is the problem so much as the kinds of loads different earthquakes put on structures.
Seattle has a couple ~7.0 earthquakes every century, so the city has experience with strong earthquakes and everything old that is still standing has at least some ability to resist earthquakes (survivor bias). The last big earthquake was in 2001 (magnitude 6.8).
a number of years ago, i worked in one of the downtown LA office towers when a 5.x earthquake hit. it was a jolt and rumble, and looking out the window, we saw the other towers nearby swaying back and forth. then we realized we were also swaying back and forth. it was unnerving to say the least. the little engineer in me eventually kicked in to point out that that engineered-in flexibility was what kept us from breaking apart and crashing into the ground.
We had had an earthquake in low 5's here a couple years earlier. That was nerve-wracking but didn't do any damage. So I think I was gauging my reaction (mostly instinctively) off that.
Actually, I just looked up the previous earthquake:
Distance from the epicenter matters as well. I was 6 miles from a 4.9 last month, my first real earthquake. It was unsettling and concerning (including for the people I was on zoom with) but that was it. Nothing fell off the walls, iirc no fatalities or buildings demolished.
The scale is logarithmic. My rule of thumb is that 5 is where things start to get much more dangerous.
It depends how close you are to the epicenter, of course. Your figure seems about right to me: I think a 5.0 near an epicenter would be pretty violent. But I've never been near an epicenter — only on the outskirts.
It also depends on what type of ground you're on. I've been in 5+ earthquakes in a house built on solid rock (Los Angeles area hills), and a 4.5 down in the valley. Being on loose ground makes it feel much worse.
You get a feel for that with the shaking frequency and/or gap between different sets of waves (P & S waves). No discernable gap and higher jerkier frequency usually means closer, a longer rolling feeling with separated phases that might last longer usually means further away.
Just like sound or ocean waves the higher frequencies attenuate out quicker over distance.
Even if you had been given 60 seconds warning, what kind of mitigation can you do for a magnitude 2,4,6? Is there anything to be done if you are walking on the street/in a car/in a N floor building?
I do not live in an earthquake prone region, so trying to understand the rationale. With tornadoes, theoretically you could move to a structurally sound room, but I am unsure if there is any such thing to be done for an earthquake.
I understand you can hide under a table (won’t help if the building collapses but you won’t be whacked in the face by a bottle or bookshelf flying through the room), stand in the doorframe (these offer some protection AFAIU if the building gets damaged, or even run out into the open space.
It depends on where you live and the kind of earthquakes that occur there.
I spent a couple of years in Chile, where deep earthquakes are common. Anything below magnitude 5 was often not even noticeable. Magnitude 5 earthquakes happened a few times a year in the area, and they were business as usual. The ground shook a little, there was some noise, and tall buildings were swaying afterwards. I experienced one magnitude 6 earthquake, which was a bit scary, but it didn't do any noticeable damage and the locals didn't seem to care.
Now I live in California, where earthquakes are rarer and more shallow. Magnitude 4 is already noticeable, and I guess magnitude 5 could do some local damage.
The biggest immediate danger is usually getting hit by flying/falling debris. Outdoors, you should get away from trees, power lines, traffic signs, buildings, etc. Indoors, you should avoid windows and tall furniture such as bookshelves, and maybe take shelter under a sturdy table or in a doorway.
> what kind of mitigation can you do for a magnitude 2,4,6?
Simply walk outside? If you have an empty area nearby that's an extremely safe spot to be in an earthquake.
If you're in a car, get out from an underpass? A lot of deaths were due to a freeway overpass pancaking in SF.
Open your garage door? This is one of the big things that is supposed to happen in California. Fire departments are supposed to have an automated system that pops the garage doors when there is an earthquake so the trucks don't get trapped by bent doors.
This made me think one should almost practice like a fire alarm drill we do in grade schools. Set a random timer and when you get the alert react. Have it go off randomly some days so you can practice getting under a desk or in a doorway as fast as possible.
Having attended grade school in BC, Canada, we used to do exactly that. Someone would come on the PA system to rattle some rocks in a jar and all students would duck under the desks until the 'earthquake' subsided, then count to 60 and quietly file out to the field.
In the years after the disaster of 1999 [1], we used to do exactly that in Turkey in the 2000s, couple times a year. I'm not sure when/why they stopped.
On a not-too-closely-related note, the last time I heard of one was in 2013, when a group of riot police forcibly dispersed a civilian drill. This was a few months after the Gezi Park protests.
I got my first tornado alert in last week's outburst of tornadoes in the midwest.I wasn't worried about it until the tornado sirens started going off. I became quite concerned when I saw the clouds. I'd never seen them so low and moving so fast. 24 confirmed tornadoes!
Luckily, they were no where near as powerful as the ones that KY got earlier this month, but it was still alarming.
And then the geniuses decided to do a test of the system yesterday at 11PM.
In case this helps, I recommend registering with nixle [0] for any emergency notifications to your phone. It provides more accurate and real time details from local agencies in your area.
> “We got some reports from folks that they got up to 10 seconds’ warning before they felt shaking. That’s pretty darn good,” said Robert de Groot, a ShakeAlert coordinator with the USGS.
Fun fact: that's three times longer than it takes to safely trip a nuclear reactor: "A reactor trip causes all the control rods to insert into the reactor core, and shut down the plant in a very short time (about three seconds)." https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-rea...
I mention this because this quake's epicenter is pretty close to the Humboldt Bay NGS, and there's always a lot of uninformed hand-wringing about atomic energy near fault lines (even though this particular station has been offline since 1988) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
It's also worth noting that, in the case of the Fukushima accident, all nuclear reactors shutdown correctly when the earthquake was detected, before it reached the plants. All of them, including the affected plant, shutdown as designed. Then the tsunami came and created a bunch of issues (lots of vital equipment at ground level, generator trucks came and were incompatible, yada yada yada).
Japan has a great early warning system for both earthquakes and tsunamis that has been in operation for quite a while now(since 2007?)
I'm a nuke proponent but it's very worth pointing out that a nuclear reactor that has been recently shutdown will need days of cooling to be available in order to safely avoid damage to the reactor and potential meltdown, pressure spikes, etc.
New-ish designs can do the cooling completely passively but not all active nuclear reactors are so equipped (Fukushima's Daiichi's ancient BWR design needed active cooling, which failed in the tsunami, while the slightly newer BWR design at Fukushima Daini survived the tsunami damage without further core damage).
Is that why Chernobyl reactor core kept burning after the blowup? I am not familiar with cycle of the nuclear core in the plant. I assumed once the control rod is in, the core will stop "combusting"?
The very short story is that unlike with something like gasoline combustion, where the energy output basically happens nearly instantaneously, a nuclear fission event releases energy both directly (from the fissioning) and indirectly (from the subsequent radioactive decay of the fission products).
This indirect energy output is small in comparison to the reactor's output, but a small percentage times a very large power output is still sufficient to meltdown a reactor (and boil away the coolant in the process) if there's no way to remove the heat being generated.
Imagine what you'd have to do with a car engine if every car trip of 4 hours or more produced 4% power output in the form of heat for the next day after your trip was over.
Once the control rods are in, the reactor is losing more energy than it is producing and will eventually cool down. However in many old (e.g. 60's era) designs including Chernobyl and Fukushima, the reactor is losing that heat via active water cooling. If you turn off those heat pumps, then the core is still energy-positive even with rods inserted.
In Chernobyl the core literally blew up, so it's a different situation. But in Fukushima the pumps lost power and so even though the control rods were fully inserted, there was a real risk it might get hot enough to melt down anyway. That was thankfully avoided.
Reactor designs differ, and they tend to have a large number of emergency backup and contingency plans. Here's a decent overview for a typical reactor: https://interestingengineering.com/nuclear-meltdown-what-wou... (scroll down to "Preventing a nuclear meltdown").
TL;DR: the control rods slow the reaction, but the fuel rods are still hot, and the space is enclosed (to prevent radioactive material from casually escaping) so it gets hotter and hotter without intervention. If the fuel rods get hot enough they start melting, which produces hydrogen, which can explode.
While mobile alerts are great, I wish there was a way to (voluntarily) get those official warnings via other means like (landline) phone call, SMS, or email - in cases where you may not have your phone on you or if there is no service.
> I wish there was a way to (voluntarily) get those official warnings via other means
Mobile alerts are the most recent addition in the US; they are also carried by radio and TV broadcast, Cable TV, and a variety of other mechanisms. But not POTS,SMS, or email.
I don't know if that's everywhere in Japan but in 2014 I was in Tokyo having lunch outside when suddenly this fast alert (ie. not a slow siren) started blaring, 5 seconds later the ground was shaking.
I'm not sure if SMS and email are ever considered urgent enough for this purpose. The alert is sent out seconds before, it's either a loud and unusual sound or you might get to read/answer after it actually hits.
SLAs for SMS are also about 98%. 1 in 50 messages isn't going to get to its intended recipient in any reasonable timeframe, which is pretty bad for a time-sensitive public safety feature.
Probably a usable amount of time I guess - I expect it probably takes 2 or 3 seconds to fully comprehend, then that leaves 5 seconds or so to take cover.
From someone living in UK where earthquakes are rare and tiny, what sort of cover can you take in less than 10 seconds? Go jump in a steel bath tub or something? Stand in a doorway? (Is that a thing? Does it depend on wood Vs brick Vs concrete?)
The advice we get in New Zealand is to get underneath something strong like a table. Sitting where I am now I could probably make it under a table in under 5 seconds.
The bigger effect maybe is that prepares you mentally for the impact, so you're already planning your next steps and aren't in quite as much surpise/panic as if you had no warning.
When things are collapsing, seconds can be the difference between life and death. Even if a system like this only saves a few extra percent of lives lost in a major earthquake, it sounds worth it to me.
> The advice we get in New Zealand is to get underneath something strong like a table
Depending on how earthquake-proof a building is, this could be bad advice. If you're in an earthquake-proof building, a table will protect you from falling objects. If the building you're in collapses, you'll want to be next to something that's not very compressible, like a bed or a couch. The collapse will leave open triangles next to objects like this, which are the best place to survive a collapse.
New Zealand doesn't really have brick or concrete buildings (except high-rises). Lots of very old weatherboard. And you're right, the advice these days isn't "get under" something, it's "get next to something big or under the doorway".
One advantage is to make it clear to you what is going on. Many people don't initially understand what they are experiencing as earthquake the first time it happens. Everything shaking is so far removed from any other experience that you might think 'wow, that's some really strong wind' because that is the closest reference your brain has for the situation.
> Stand in a doorway? (Is that a thing? Does it depend on wood Vs brick Vs concrete?)
In earthquake country we don't have brick or unreinforced concrete doorways, for this exact reason. Visiting brits tend to make fun of our flimsy wood-frame buildings. Having actually been under a doorframe in a magnitude 6.9 earthquake, I'll take the wood frame any time ;)
I don’t know what it sounds like in California, but in Japan, where I live, it’s unmistakable: a very loud buzz followed by a female voice saying firmly—in Japanese, at least on my phone— “It’s an earthquake,” repeated over and over.
I’ve experienced it maybe a dozen times over the past ten years. (I’ve felt earthquakes much more frequently here than I did in California, where I grew up.)
Two or three times it has woken me up in the middle of the night, and I was able to get up and move away from the dresser that's right next to my futon and could conceivably tip over on me. (I shouldn't be sleeping there, I know.)
Several times I was near other people—on a commuter train, in a meeting, walking along a sidewalk—when multiple phones sounded the alarm at the same time. Once or twice, I’ve been on a train that stopped suddenly with an automated announcement coming over the loudspeaker saying “Emergency stop! Earthquake.” Once I felt fairly strong shaking after the train had stopped, so the advance warning might have prevented a derailment.
Maybe half the time no perceptible shaking has followed the alert, either because I was too far away from the affected area or because it was a false alarm. One such false alarm occurred on July 29, 2020, and the Meteorological Agency issued an apology [1, in Japanese]. There have also been at least a couple of strong earthquakes where the system didn’t go off when it was supposed to, so it’s not yet perfect.
The alerts are startling but also reassuring. It’s much better to have a twenty-second warning than none at all.
A couple of months ago I was walking through a park late at night thinking I was alone. So it was a rather surreal experience to see phones light up everywhere around me with that woman's voice speaking in almost perfect unison.
In this particular case there was a 2-3 second warning. Was one of the more violent ones Tokyo has had recently and I was rather glad to not have been inside.
This[1] is how it sounds in Japan if anyone is interested.
The author of the sound (Kokubo Takashi) interviewed in the past[2] that he designed the sound to make people alerted, but it must not make people feel uneasy or causing panic. The sound must also not resemble any other alert sound as people may ignore it. The result is what we're using in Japan today, repeating three times to ensure it draws enough attention.
Someone needs to tell the North American market to not make everything the same tone. The alerts in California are almost completely ignored now because they use it constantly for Amber Alerts/Silver Alerts.
I have long complained that "amber alerts," "silver alerts," and in some states "blue alerts" have seriously degraded the value and functionality of these alerts through desensitization. The original design goal that lead, through many evolutions, to EAS/WEA/IPAWS/etc, was an alert system that would cause the public to take organized, pre-planned steps within 30 seconds of the issuance of the alert [1]. While we no longer worry about nuclear attack on such a short timeline, earthquake early warning has once again highlighted the requirement for a system that is immediately recognizable as requiring protective action. Overloading EAS with these types of messages, while politically appealing, has effectively eliminated the ability of the system to demand an immediate response. This will, ultimately, endanger lives.
Ultimately, nothing should be issued via EAS that does not require prompt and decisive action. This is not an exotic category: tornadoes, flash flooding, large hail, tsunamis, earthquakes, and civil and industrial emergencies are all reasonably frequent real-world events in which prompt and decisive action by the public saves lives and property. Unfortunately we have completely tangled them in with "a child was abducted, or a senior citizen wandered, or a cop was shot somewhere in the state," a scenario with no generally understood action for the public. That information should be disseminated using means other than the distinctive EAS attention tone which has always been intended to be reserved for those situation in which you must act immediately [2].
This doesn't mean a return to the old situation in which only POTUS was authorized to issue emergency messages, but it should mean that emergency message issuance is limited to scenarios that meet the same general criteria of requiring immediate action, regardless of their originator. The NWS and state governors (really their EOCs) do produce such alerts, but they should receive specific criteria to require.
[1] It had been determined in the 1950s that action within 30 seconds would produce substantial (e.g. 70%) reduction in fatalities in the case of an unanticipated nuclear attack, but that warning greater than 30 seconds was not always feasible. Improved early detection systems such as OTH radar have made this issue somewhat obsolete, although more recent developments such as HGVs and nuclear-armed "sea drones" like Kanyon have potentially brought it back to relevance even just in the case of nuclear war.
[2] Really the attention tone is a leftover technical detail from an earlier implementation, but its use has been specifically protected because it is so well recognized by the public as an indication of a national emergency. Unfortunately that protection is at the whims of legislators which frequently expand it to include whatever is politically appealing, regardless of actual outcomes.
That's why I have them disabled in my phone. I once got Amber Alert in the airplane 35K feet above and flying over Colorado (LAX - DCA). Alerts are useful but over-abused unintentionally. The only I can't disable is the top one, I think it is Presidential Alert?
There have also been at least a couple of strong earthquakes where the system didn’t go off when it was supposed to, so it’s not yet perfect.
Obviously, I don't know the exact details of those incidents, but if the epicentre is too close to you, there will not be time for the alert to occur. The alerts work because the earthquake travels slower than the telecommunications signals. No alert can be triggered until after an earthquake has occurred. Then, however, a warning can be sent to notify people further away from the epicentre before the shaking reaches them.
Yes, the further you are from the epicenter the more time there is for a warning, but it doesn't rely on having a detector right at the center. That's because there are two sets of seismic waves that travel at different speeds. P waves arrive first; S (shear) waves cause most of the damage. Of course, electronic signals travel much faster than either.
In the large earthquake in Tokyo in October, I felt the P wave, then got the alert on one of my phones, then the s-wave hit and I got the alert on my other phone (different provider). Interesting seeing the race, and I wonder how optimized notification systems are.
> ... I was able to get up and move away from the dresser that's right next to my futon and could conceivably tip over on me. (I shouldn't be sleeping there, I know.)
There are restraints you can buy that attach furniture to the walls with a strap. I know its sold to prevent children from attempting to turn their dresser drawers into a set of steps which when climbed tips over on top of them.
Even my cheap IKEA bookcase came with a strap and a mount point for it. I think it would withstand a moderate earthquake, but not necessarily a child applying that level of leverage.
> One such false alarm occurred on July 29, 2020, and the Meteorological Agency issued an apology
That's so important for emergency alert systems: Acknowledgement that false alarms are disruptive and apologizing for the stress that they cause.
After being woken up in the middle of the night for an unjustified alarm I proactively turn off all emergency alarms on my phone. If, in the morning, all the headlines were about an apology, I'd keep the alarm on.
I read this story on reddit, will try and find it . But someone was working in an office in Tokyo with hundreds of mobile phones that were on . Some kind of call centre or something.
They said they’d worked back late and we’re the only person left on the floor when every single mobile did what you describe.
They said “it was truly the sound of the apocalypse” ha
Interesting. As someone who watches the live seismic data in Japan from the US, I would have thought it’d be the nice sounding chime that they play on TV stations. Then again, it’s a phone, so buzzing is definitely a go-to solution for notifying the people in the vicinity.
Ever receive a flash flood warning, severe weather alert (lightning, tornado), or amber alert on your phone? It'd be the same notification. I'm sure there's others too, those are just the ones I've received before.
I have mixed feelings on Amber Alerts. I'm in Texas, and I receive alerts for things that are happening so far away from me, that most states could fit inside the distance apart. Seems like there should be some sort of max distance away for the alerts to be issued.
I've also wondered if useable information has been received from these alerts, or if it's just a bit of psychology being used against the perps when the alert about them goes off on their phone.
The majority of amber alerts are from parents in custody disputes. Mom says dad stole the kids or visa versa. They really should not be putting these cases into the same category as abductions.
There should be a fine for this. I understand that there are situations where a parent does take their kids where it would actually fall under abduction/kidnapping. However, if parents are abusing the alert system for minor custody disputes, then this should be handled with a severe punishment. Almost to the point of losing the custody battle if they're that immature.
The alerts are sent by police, not parents. I was curious and at one point went thru a year's records for NY state amber alerts. There were zero instances of stranger abduction. Most cases are as you say children taken by parent without custodial rights, with a secondary set of teens running away, sometimes with an older romantic partner.
Yeah if you give a button to an employee and tell them “you won’t ever be yelled at for pushing the button, but if you fail to push the button and something happens you will be yelled at” - that button is going to get pushed. A lot.
It would be really nice on Android if I could get the alerts without the obnoxious noise.
Since the noise and the alert are tied together, and I absolutely detest the noise, I have the alert turned off.
It's silly that you can turn off the ring for a phone call and still get the notification, but can't turn off the alert noise without also turning off the alert notification.
Yeah, the original idea was excellent. Great for warnings or child abductions but now even the child abduction stuff is annoying. Some parents battling over the custody of their kids is now a child abduction
It's absolutely crazy that whoever decided to create the warning system in Canada decided to roll "amber alerts" and "presidential alerts" into the same alert. So now I can get woken up in the middle of the night for an alert for a lost child hundreds of kilometers away that I can't do anything about - and, even if I turn off amber alerts, they still come in as a presidential message.
Earthquakes tend to have a bit of a ramp up period (P wave vs S wave), I was in an earthquake once and could figure out initially what was going on, because I was experiencing the first low intensity waves. An alert would avoid this initial confusion.
According to a graphic in the OP article there are different types of mobile alerts depending on the earthquake strength, only the strongest ones triggering an actual Wireless Emergency Alert.
I lived through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake near the epicenter in Aptos California. My house suffered extensive damage. I think 3 people total were killed in Santa Cruz. One was standing next to a brick building and the other was next to a horse that bolted. A 10 second warning probably would have saved their lives, if they were prepared to take action when they got it. On the other hand, I don't think a 10 second warning would have done me any good. It's a great technology though.
The largest number of deaths (42) came from the collapse of a double decker freeway structure in Oakland. It would have been much worse if it weren't for the baseball championship game that got many people watching the game instead of driving home.
I was in grad school at UC Berkeley and living in San Francisco at the time. Fortunately I left early that day, since BART was stopped and the Bay Bridge was impassible after the earthquake.
yeah, I don't think a 10 second warning would have done anything other than get me outside.
As it was, I dropped the bag of garbage I was just about to take out, saw the corner of the living room in my second story wood frame apartment in Mountain View move 2 feet in each direction, and tried to get outside. That was unsuccessful because everything in my hallway closet flew out and blocked the front door. So I headed to my bedroom and dove into the closet filled with dirty clothes. I remained there safely until it was over. Which was probably safer than going outside with exploding transformers and sketchy power lines.
Someone else commented on wanting to feel a smaller quake. As someone born and raised in CA I used to love feeling earthquakes. I thought they were fun! That was until Loma Prieta, where I honestly thought I was going to die.
Or more people would have ran out of the house and gotten hit by falling debris as they fled their house. It’s hard to act rationally in that situation.
I went through all the duck and cover drills through school, and when the house started shaking, I bolted out of there during that earthquake.
For quite some time, Japan has had an automated system which will send signals to bullet trains to begin braking, immediately after the detection of an earthquake in a nearby region.
The wireless telecom network traffic speed and latency can outpace the earthquake wave propagation through the ground.
It is my understanding that this worked successfully in the major quake in 2011, and that there were no derailments of high-speed trains.
Sub 4.2 earthquakes feel like a truck rumbling by your house (if you have an old house/apartment). I used to live on a busy street in SF and whenever there was an earthquake it was always ... was that a large truck or an earthquake. Only when it keep rattling did it really differentiate.
I experienced my first and only earthquake (5.8 magnitude) while visiting the holocaust museum in Washington DC. It was very out of the ordinary for the region and so as strange as it sounds, myself, my family and some other people present all thought the shaking was a part of the exhibit and simply carried on.... only for a security guard to come running in several minutes later to kick us out of the building.
I think earthquakes can by easy to miss sometimes for those unused to them because they feel so mundane. Like everyone's experienced a certain degree of shaking before, heck the turbulence in a plane isn't much different. This obviously changes at higher magnitudes but really changed my perspective.
Santa Clara county. Every time there was a new health order or vaccine availability change they sent an alert. Not from an app. On iPhone the options are amber alerts, emergency alerts, and public safety alerts. The question is what combo of those if any will give you real emergencies and skip the custody disputes and covid noise.
San Mateo county. Have all alerts enabled in my iPhone and never got any covid-related or custody dispute alerts. You probably either have some app installed or enrolled in some service.
If that happened here in Indiana, I'd totally ignore it because of all the "Extreme Alert" "Silver Alert" messages that show up at all hours on my phone.
Some day, the New Madrid fault is going to snap, and it might even take down my house... 25 miles from Chicago.
Back in 2016, Taiwan rolled out a system like this but also include warnings on mudslide, emergency road closure, thunderstorm, air raid drill, nuclear disaster, dam release.
Since then, however, I have only received alerts on earthquakes and air raid drills.
Does anybody know of the FOSS app for this that would work on my hardened degoogled phone? The alerts would need to delivered via web socket or Gotify since I have no Google Play Services.
I would think with a million cellphones with sensitive accelorometers you could get the data much quicker and much more accurate (a million+ data points gives you a lot of options)
I live in Humboldt County, so I got one of these notifications.
Mine arrived 5 seconds after the earthquake, and several of the people on my discord server got it 2-5s after the earthquake. One person got it a couple seconds before.
I have experienced a few earthquakes, big and small.
In one of the smaller but not trivial ones, at night, I was sleeping, woke up due to the vibrations, looked out of the window, and saw the ground shaking.
Went out of my house to check, and yes, it was.
It was an interesting fleeting experience. I was sitting on the couch, phone in hand, when it emitted an unusual fairly obnoxious noise. I glanced at the screen, saw the words earthquake and 4 something, and understood what was being conveyed sort of inchoately without making it explicit sense of it. My wife was sitting next to me reading so I turned to her and tried to show it to her but she remained absorbed in her reading.
Then the room jolted, rocked a little, and settled. The nice thing about the alert is I remained relaxed the whole time. Because the alert indicated the magnitude, I wasn't too worried about damage or personal injury.
Now if it had warned of a larger earthquake, like a 5 or 6, I imagine I would have been more panicked. Still, the warning would have been even more valuable in that case.
It was one of the more acute "Now this feels like living in the future" moments I've had recently.