10 ms·

Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt

257 points by damian2000 12y ago

rdl 12y ago
A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans, especially at 3am, but it would be cool to have this feed into automatic systems to automatically put them in a "safer" state before an earthquake hits. It might even be that 10 false positives a day are worth it to catch one real event, if the "safing" operation is relatively non-disruptive.
- waiwai933 12y ago
  If the system were relatively reliable, 10 seconds is actually a lot of time. During the day, it's enough time for many people to take cover. During the night, it's enough time to at least get people up and semi-oriented. The other thing to note is that earthquakes are much shorter than most people think, usually about a minute long. 10 seconds is quite a bit of time compared to that.
  - argonaut 12y ago
    I think the point is that 10 seconds of warning really translates to 0-5 seconds of warning given the time it takes to send out the warning (text, radio, emergency broadcast). Then add in time to wake and get oriented.
    - Scoundreller 12y ago
      Which might mean getting to a safe place 20 seconds into the earthquake instead of 30 seconds into it. I wouldn't downplay this.
      - ekianjo 12y ago
        You can get under a table in 5 seconds. That's a change between life and death by having your fridge or large shelf fall on you.
        easytiger 12y ago
        If i lived in an area of tectonic activity I'm pretty sure i'd anchor my fridge to the wall
        ghshephard 12y ago
        Unlikely. The Bay Area is an area of "tectonic activity" (as evidenced by Loma Prieta in 1989, and now the the 6.0 from yesterday) - but I"m willing to wager fewer than 1 in a thousand people anchor their fridge to the wall. Hot water heaters and book cases - Yes. But not fridges. They rarely tip over in earthquakes.
        rdl 12y ago
        I'm not really afraid of what happens if my fridge tips over, either. I spend very little time in front of the fridge, and never when anything but fully alert. If the room started shaking, I could probably step a little to the left or to the right and be fine. I'm probably more concerned about all the glasses on high shelves, or the knives, etc., in terms of floor hazards after the quake. The thing which terrifies me is that I'm in a 1971-construction building with a soft story, in a city with a defective police department. My car is parked in that soft story. Assuming the entire building doesn't collapse and kill me, there's nothing above my-standing-height except one projector, which even from projector-height, would be unlikely to kill me. But I'd probably have fallen to my death and been crushed by huge volumes of unreinforced masonry before that. (Please, please, if there's going to be an earthquake while I'm in the Bay Area, let it happened while I'm in the office, or even better, in a datacenter. The new office is being fully retrofitted right now, so it should be pretty good.)
  - freditup 12y ago
    But there's no way to reliably get information to all people within ten seconds. Even if a text message alert was sent out as soon as the system was triggered, that time, plus the time for even the most phone-ready people to pull out their phone and do the necessary steps to read a message leads to basically no warning at all.
    - w00kie 12y ago
      In Japan, all phones (even the iPhone) are setup to emit a loud alarm sound when an earthquake warning is sent, whether your phone is on manner mode or not. The alarm sound is very distinctive and the same for all phones as well as all TV channels.
      - Scoundreller 12y ago
        This is what I could find: The sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPDvAYF8Q-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPDvAYF8Q-I Wikipedia article in bad need of proof-reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japan) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japan...
      - ssclafani 12y ago
        People in Tokyo had a 60 second warning for the 2011 quake. Here's a good translation of the TV alerts from that day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24KfBwkMw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24KfBwkMw_M Phone alert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAAIcqI_0Jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAAIcqI_0Jk Warning countdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-FMpNBfna8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-FMpNBfna8
        chvid 12y ago
        The first and the last video are quite impressive. It is really an amazing warning system saving real lives. Thanks for posting.
        kalleboo 12y ago
        Here's a matrix of the 6 big TV channels. Top left is the national broadcast (of the public broadcaster, NHK), the others are local commercial Tokyo broadcasts. The earthquake was initially not estimated to be big enough to affect Tokyo so Tokyo stations didn't automatically broadcast the initial alert. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOrAwvJLKxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOrAwvJLKxo
  - peter303 12y ago
    The 20 seconds of shaking during the Loma Prieta Quake certainly felt like minutes to me!
- hendzen 12y ago
  Yep - kind of like active hard-drive protection [0]. I could imagine stop-lights turning red at major intersections, elevators stopping and opening at the nearest floor, BART trains coming to a stop, etc. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_hard-drive_protection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_hard-drive_protection
- idlewords 12y ago
  Consider the fact that Japan is swarming with high-speed trains, but there were no derailments during the huge Tōhoku quake. The biggest advantage of warning is fire prevention, as gas lines can shut automatically. But I also wouldn't mind a little server interrupt telling my machines to get into a consistent state since they're about to be knocked offline.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    If you can determine how to subscribe to the push notifications Google and Apple send for their devices specifically for these events, you could have a daemon monitor for the alert and park your spinning disk drive heads. Apps already have access to the data [http://quakeapp.com/ http://quakeapp.com/].
    - idlewords 12y ago
      Spinning disk drive heads? Okay, GRANDPA!
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Hey there Whipersnapper (31 is a bit young to be "GRANDPA"). Your SSD in your Mac Book Air may be the "new hotness", but every datacenter in the world that needs a lot of hot storage is using spinning disk (disclaimer: does not apply to low latency applications like AWS EBS, providers like Cloudflare, etc).
        idlewords 12y ago
        Yeah, of course. I was kidding—briefly forgetting what site I was on.
- shykes 12y ago
  The first application that comes to mind is vehicles. Picture a car driving at full speed, or an airplane about to land. With a 10 second early warning, at the very least the driver/pilot could receive a clear visual and audible alert instructing it to slow down / abort approach, brace for impact, alert passengers, etc. Also: operators of heavy or dangerous machinery, surgeons, construction workers...
  - idlewords 12y ago
    Terrific real-life example from Japan: http://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature122751 http://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature122751 "According to Higashi, only one train, running under test without passengers, derailed that day, when it was approaching Sendai, before it was immediately halted by the emergency braking."
- tzs 12y ago
  It's an interesting exercise to spend a day or two trying to be aware of what would be the most likely dangers where you are at the moment if you were caught in a good sizes quake right then. I think that most will find that there are many times each day where a few seconds warning would make a difference. Some common situations: • Carrying a heavy item that would hurt you if you dropped it on your foot, or fell down and it landed on you. • Sitting near a shelf with something heavy on it (surround speaker, for example). • Many things in the kitchen: carrying hot liquid; hot liquid on the stove; using a knife. • Using power tools: soldering; drilling; sawing. • Juggling torches. Just a couple seconds warning can give you time to put down a heavy object, move from where your speaker will fall on you or prepare to deflect it, get out of the way of potential spills in the kitchen, put down the knife, stop your power tools, and stop juggling.
  - zevets 12y ago
    I attended a talk by one of the developers of this system, and since earthquake warnings are so short (tens of seconds), it's unlikely that traditional alert mechanisms can be delivered to the general public. As such, the primary consumers of the device will be places like nuclear power plants and major industrial operators who are willing to install special alarms. The other example he gave was giving doctors performing surgery time to step away from the patient, so that they dont turn things into a real life game of surgeon simulator, an example I personally find to be extremely horrifying and nightmare inducing.
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      Cell phone app. Setup something like the reverse-911 system, or even just a downloadable app that can wake your phone from sleep and use the speakers to alert its carrier that an earthquake is on the way. Hell, maybe this is even a use for "Yo".
      - plainOldText 12y ago
        How about the delay? The message is not delivered instantly. Plus, such a system would be required to be already scaled up, and stay in that state always, to support sending messages to millions of "subscribers", which would only add additional delay.
- bonestamp2 12y ago
  Excellent point. It could, for example, switch off gas lines at various checkpoints. I wonder how that might that affect appliances? For example, if a hot water heater is heating and the flame goes out, but then the gas comes back on is the heater smart enough to re-ignite the gas (or shut it off)?
  - omegaworks 12y ago
    Most things with a pilot light make use of a thermocouple to keep the gas from leaking out when no flame is present.
    - Filligree 12y ago
      A thermocouple which won't shut off the gas immediately. However (targeting this mostly at GP), the amount of gas which will leak should be absolutely minimal and will soon disperse into nonignitability.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans Ten seconds is plenty for me to drop under my work desk, or at least be well on the way. Similarly my daughter's school class. That can make a big difference to survivial rates.
- Aqua_Geek 12y ago
  > A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans [...] One of the things mentioned on the USGS site is doctors in surgery. Knowing even a couple of seconds in advance that you should pause the procedure could save lives.
- xxs 12y ago
  >> It might even be that 10 false positives a day are worth it to catch one real event, if the "safing" operation is relatively non-disruptive. This will cause so much panic that people will ignore them at some point. 10 false positives (even 1 a day) just make the system unreliable.
  - UweSchmidt 12y ago
    OP seems to be talking about "automated systems". A harddisk might stop reading/writing for moment and park the heads to avoid a head-crash and things like that.
- wellboy 12y ago
  There should be an app for that --> Yo. Seriously, it should be a functionality of Yo. As of now you can subscribe to channels already, I think there should also be default channels that all users are subscribed to, for events that happens a few times a year and less.
- nkozyra 12y ago
  But how much time is left after processing and delivery latency? I wonder if it could go from warning to end user within those 10 seconds.
- ctdonath 12y ago
  Don't underestimate the value of people simply knowing what's happening. There's a big difference (translating to greater safety) between reactions of "WTF?" vs "here it comes!"
- fludlight 12y ago
  There's a Bay Area company with a commercial early warning system that is capable of just that! http://www.seismicwarning.com/about/overview.php http://www.seismicwarning.com/about/overview.php
- jac_no_k 12y ago
  In Japan, the alert is accompanied with magnitude and epicenter information. This alert seems to be also distributed by broadcast SMS. Apps on the phone determine if it crosses a threshold to alert or not. Even after the shaking has started, it's good to know just how strong it will be. So if it's 3am, I know whether I could ignore or I should do checks.
damian2000 12y ago
Japan's system ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_%28Japan%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_%28Jap...
melling 12y ago
To be clear, the detectors in Napa felt the tremors then transmitted the data to Berkeley. They got a 10 second warning because the tremors travel much slower than the speed of light. Being 10 seconds away means the quake is much less intense. This is helpful, but what we need is a warning for people within a few seconds of the epicenter.
- idlewords 12y ago
  The various types of seismic waves travel at different speeds. Luckily the most damaging are slowest, which travel at about half the speed of the fastest (~5 km/s). You can detect the fast waves and trigger warnings immediately, without having to wait for the damage to start. California is a little bit of a special case, in that quake damage falls off rapidly with distance (the rock is kind of broken up here and doesn't transmit energy well). Earthquakes east of the rockies, while rarer, also have a much bigger radius of damage. In areas like the New Madrid Seismic Zone you could get useful warning times on the order of minutes. Any early warning system is worth its weight in gold if it's automatically linked to infrastucture like gas mains and train signals (or data centers!). Even a few seconds warning can save lives. Unfortunately, like any other kind of public infrastructure besides roads, getting a decent warning system in place is politically impossibe in the US.
bigiain 12y ago
"The system works because while earthquakes travel at the speed of sound ..." That sounds like a somewhat misleading simplification or a complete misunderstanding. Presumably "the speed of sound in the earth" and "the speed at which earthquakes travel" is by definition the same - earthquakes just being "sound vibrations" in the earth with macro level amplitudes. I'd be very surprised if that was particularly close to what people think of as "the speed of sound" (which I'd assume means "about 350m/s").
- Steuard 12y ago
  Sure, and the warning signal doesn't travel at the full vacuum speed of light, either: part or all of its path goes through electronics, and electrical signals travel only something like 0.5c. But this is a really short article aiming to give readers the gist of how the system works. Referring to "the speed of sound" without specifying the material is still probably within an order of magnitude or so of being accurate, and I don't know how valuable greater precision would be in this context. (In any case, I'll wager that the number of people who 1) have a solid, intuitive understanding of the 350m/s speed of sound in air, but also 2) don't understand that earthquake wave speeds in rock are also essentially sound waves but travel significantly faster, is pretty low.)
fmela 12y ago
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/723/ http://xkcd.com/723/
- juergen 12y ago
  Very good one, especially in this context
byteCoder 12y ago
Of course, we never hear about all the times the system has given false positives.
- wtallis 12y ago
  Given the design of this system (it's an early warning system, not a prediction system), the false positive rate could easily be zero so far.
astrocat 12y ago
Yo. From EARTHQUAKE. [edit] tough crowd...
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  Jokes are frowned upon on HN. Everyone is bent on avoiding the slashdot slippery slope. Communities do learn with History...
- etjossem 12y ago
  Not sure why this was downvoted! Honestly, that's one of the best uses for Yo I've seen so far. Relatedly: http://www.earthquakeyo.com/ http://www.earthquakeyo.com/
hnriot 12y ago
I couldn't find how I could get this. I got a txt from the USGS but that was after the event and because I set up twitter to txt me that account, does anyone know how to get these early warnings? I woke up, but in SF it wasn't much of a big deal.
largote 12y ago
Japan, Mexico City, and other seismically active places, have such systems in place and have had them for years. Amazing that California, the epicenter of tech, is just getting on board with this.
- rwg 12y ago
  As someone who used to work for a university's geosciences department as a Unix sysadmin/programmer and who worked on two different seismic monitoring networks (one spread across the state for earthquake monitoring and one parked on top of a coal mine), allow me to explain why earthquake monitoring in the United States is largely stuck in the stone age: There's no f---ing money. Back in the '80s, there were a lot of regional seismic networks around the country, especially east of the Mississippi. But as time marched on and budgets got slashed, regional seismic networks disappeared one by one. Today, only the largest regional networks survive — generally the ones that are mostly funded by the states they're in and/or have increased their share of USGS/ANSS funding by taking over monitoring for areas of the country that used to be covered by the now-defunct networks. The regional seismic networks that are left spend pretty much all of their dollars on equipment and operations. Installing/upgrading/running permanent seismograph stations is expensive — a basic solar-powered one with a shallow fiberglass vault, a three component short period sensor, and a three channel digitizer will run you ~$12,000 just in equipment and materials. The sky's the limit if you go fancier than that (broadband sensors, strong motion sensors, atmospheric sensors, borehole sensors, six channel digitizer, elaborate vaults, VSAT, etc.). Then there's the recurring communications cost, the cost of regular site visits, the cost of regular battery replacements, replacing solar panels/equipment boxes that morons shoot at for laughs, etc. What I'm getting at is that in the monetary battles of "keep seismograph stations working" vs. "hire programmer to write useful software", the stations will win every time. Even this LA Times article about Berkeley's early warning system notes, "A lack of funds, however, has slowed the system's progress." If the epicenter of tech wants to do something wonderful for earthquake seismology, figure out how to make dirt cheap 1- or 3-channel seismic digitizers (low-pass filter + low noise amp + 20-bit ADC @ 100–200 accurately timestamped samples/s, ≤1 watt average power draw @ 12 VDC, speaks TCP/IP over 802.11g/n) and dirt cheap 1- or 3-component short period sensors (1 or 2 Hz corner frequency, decent sensitivity). Then figure out how to get thousands of these dirt cheap digitizers and sensors in backyards all over the country and contributing data in real-time to IRIS and/or the closest regional seismic network. If the cost of acquiring quality seismic data goes down, that frees up money to actually do something with the data. When I was still at the university job, my job-related pipe dream was to blanket the state with these non-existent dirt cheap stations. Even one or two per county in my state would've increased our station count by a factor of >15, greatly improved the quality of our earthquake locations, and allowed us to determine focal mechanisms (the orientation of the fault and direction of the slip) even for small earthquakes.
ghshephard 12y ago
Back in 1999/2000 I had a friend in Castro Valley call me in the morning to ask me if I was feeling the earthquake - I said nope, and then 5 seconds later - it hit me in Sunnyvale. That's another way of earthquake advance warning - taking advantage of the latency between the epicenter and the surrounding area.
- miguelrochefort 12y ago
  This is exactly what the system does...
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    I realized that after reading the threads, and some related articles. I don't really understand why anybody felt a need to "announce" that the early warning system, "Worked" - I would presume that it has always been the case (at least since tele-connected seismometers were invented) that there has been an early warning of every earthquake from sites that were remote to where the sensors were. Presumably this is Earthquake Monitoring/Alert systems 101. (And, in Japan they've greatly advanced the signaling to the public)
itazula 12y ago
10 seconds can be a lifesaver for someone doing construction on a high-rise building.
phreeza 12y ago
There should be a kaggle challenge for this, I would love to give that data a shot.
adalyac 12y ago
So... why is it (geologically) not possible to predict an earthquake earlier than 10 seconds? Anyone know of research trying to beat that?
- jordanthoms 12y ago
  They're not actually predicting the earthquake - just detecting it as soon as it happens, and transmitting a signal out faster than the earthquake waves travel. So to beat that requires actually predicting when it will happen beforehand, which nobody has made any real headway on in a long time.
- lutusp 12y ago
  It's not a prediction if the earthquake has already begun. The linked article explains that they were able to give ten seconds' warning only because a sensor near the epicenter was able to send an alert at the speed of light, thus beating the seismic waves, which travel at a much slower speed. About prediction research, so far there are too few ways to gather relevant data for processes deep within the earth, and too little theoretical knowledge. This should be an attractive field for someone with enough physical and scientific training and a willingness to do difficult research.
- peter303 12y ago
  Its called "early warning". Hopefully sensors near the earthquake will warn humans miles away.
helperdev 12y ago
10 seconds might be enough time to trigger a custom alert on iPhones and Droids with a specific alarm that an earthquake is imminent. Enough time to get under a table.
blunte 12y ago
This post is a nice reminder of the privacy issues (and how users should really consider what information they choose to give away). Yes scientifically this is interesting. But it also means that we are willingly allowing ourselves to be tracked to great detail. You know they have internal reports or queries to show who has sex and when. Not that this is a big deal - we're human, and humans have sex. But it also can show who is having sex with whom, in some cases. How long until Jawbone starts receiving court requests for this? (probably already happens).
oldspiceman 12y ago
I was in an earthquake in Hiroshima a few months ago. When the shaking started I was really confused. If my phone was blaring "earthquake" it would have been helpful. Also, the warning on my iPhone was in Japanese and it was impossible to copy and paste it into a translator it so it was useless.
peter303 12y ago
"QuakeFinder" is crowdsourcing earthquake warning system. It uses accelerometers in laptops, tablets, smartphones and special PC boards. The hypothesis is that tens of thousands of networked accelerometers with so-so signals may be useful for seismology, compared to few hundred professional seismometers drilled into bedrock. I saw some promising early studies, but lost track of the project.
- peter303 12y ago
  The original accelerometers were supposed to save laptop disks before a laptop hit the ground. But then Apple put them into smartphones to measure orientation and location. Their cost has fallen to a few dimes.
PMan74 12y ago
Low tech solution: http://asset-c.soup.io/asset/2982/0993_c492.gif http://asset-c.soup.io/asset/2982/0993_c492.gif
- robbyking 12y ago
  Both of my dogs (aged 12 and 14, respectively) slept right through it.
whyleym 12y ago
This could be very interesting if the 10 second timescale could be increased - as it stands 10 seconds is not enough time to do anything meaningful other than potentially crawl under your desk. I know little of the science behind earthquakes and the movement of tectonic plates, however it would seem that if 10 seconds warning is possible today then further longer periods of time in the future could help people and or the technology surrounding building's and the infrastructure within the building to ready themselves/itself for the onset of an earthquake.

257 points by damian2000 12y ago

rdl 12y ago

A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans, especially at 3am, but it would be cool to have this feed into automatic systems to automatically put them in a "safer" state before an earthquake hits. It might even be that 10 false positives a day are worth it to catch one real event, if the "safing" operation is relatively non-disruptive.

waiwai933 12y ago
If the system were relatively reliable, 10 seconds is actually a lot of time. During the day, it's enough time for many people to take cover. During the night, it's enough time to at least get people up and semi-oriented. The other thing to note is that earthquakes are much shorter than most people think, usually about a minute long. 10 seconds is quite a bit of time compared to that.
- argonaut 12y ago
  I think the point is that 10 seconds of warning really translates to 0-5 seconds of warning given the time it takes to send out the warning (text, radio, emergency broadcast). Then add in time to wake and get oriented.
  - Scoundreller 12y ago
    Which might mean getting to a safe place 20 seconds into the earthquake instead of 30 seconds into it. I wouldn't downplay this.
    - ekianjo 12y ago
      You can get under a table in 5 seconds. That's a change between life and death by having your fridge or large shelf fall on you.
      - easytiger 12y ago
        If i lived in an area of tectonic activity I'm pretty sure i'd anchor my fridge to the wall
        ghshephard 12y ago
        Unlikely. The Bay Area is an area of "tectonic activity" (as evidenced by Loma Prieta in 1989, and now the the 6.0 from yesterday) - but I"m willing to wager fewer than 1 in a thousand people anchor their fridge to the wall. Hot water heaters and book cases - Yes. But not fridges. They rarely tip over in earthquakes.
        rdl 12y ago
        I'm not really afraid of what happens if my fridge tips over, either. I spend very little time in front of the fridge, and never when anything but fully alert. If the room started shaking, I could probably step a little to the left or to the right and be fine. I'm probably more concerned about all the glasses on high shelves, or the knives, etc., in terms of floor hazards after the quake. The thing which terrifies me is that I'm in a 1971-construction building with a soft story, in a city with a defective police department. My car is parked in that soft story. Assuming the entire building doesn't collapse and kill me, there's nothing above my-standing-height except one projector, which even from projector-height, would be unlikely to kill me. But I'd probably have fallen to my death and been crushed by huge volumes of unreinforced masonry before that. (Please, please, if there's going to be an earthquake while I'm in the Bay Area, let it happened while I'm in the office, or even better, in a datacenter. The new office is being fully retrofitted right now, so it should be pretty good.)
- freditup 12y ago
  But there's no way to reliably get information to all people within ten seconds. Even if a text message alert was sent out as soon as the system was triggered, that time, plus the time for even the most phone-ready people to pull out their phone and do the necessary steps to read a message leads to basically no warning at all.
  - w00kie 12y ago
    In Japan, all phones (even the iPhone) are setup to emit a loud alarm sound when an earthquake warning is sent, whether your phone is on manner mode or not. The alarm sound is very distinctive and the same for all phones as well as all TV channels.
    - Scoundreller 12y ago
      This is what I could find: The sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPDvAYF8Q-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPDvAYF8Q-I Wikipedia article in bad need of proof-reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japan) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japan...
    - ssclafani 12y ago
      People in Tokyo had a 60 second warning for the 2011 quake. Here's a good translation of the TV alerts from that day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24KfBwkMw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24KfBwkMw_M Phone alert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAAIcqI_0Jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAAIcqI_0Jk Warning countdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-FMpNBfna8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-FMpNBfna8
      - chvid 12y ago
        The first and the last video are quite impressive. It is really an amazing warning system saving real lives. Thanks for posting.
      - kalleboo 12y ago
        Here's a matrix of the 6 big TV channels. Top left is the national broadcast (of the public broadcaster, NHK), the others are local commercial Tokyo broadcasts. The earthquake was initially not estimated to be big enough to affect Tokyo so Tokyo stations didn't automatically broadcast the initial alert. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOrAwvJLKxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOrAwvJLKxo
- peter303 12y ago
  The 20 seconds of shaking during the Loma Prieta Quake certainly felt like minutes to me!
hendzen 12y ago
Yep - kind of like active hard-drive protection [0]. I could imagine stop-lights turning red at major intersections, elevators stopping and opening at the nearest floor, BART trains coming to a stop, etc. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_hard-drive_protection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_hard-drive_protection
idlewords 12y ago
Consider the fact that Japan is swarming with high-speed trains, but there were no derailments during the huge Tōhoku quake. The biggest advantage of warning is fire prevention, as gas lines can shut automatically. But I also wouldn't mind a little server interrupt telling my machines to get into a consistent state since they're about to be knocked offline.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  If you can determine how to subscribe to the push notifications Google and Apple send for their devices specifically for these events, you could have a daemon monitor for the alert and park your spinning disk drive heads. Apps already have access to the data [http://quakeapp.com/ http://quakeapp.com/].
  - idlewords 12y ago
    Spinning disk drive heads? Okay, GRANDPA!
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Hey there Whipersnapper (31 is a bit young to be "GRANDPA"). Your SSD in your Mac Book Air may be the "new hotness", but every datacenter in the world that needs a lot of hot storage is using spinning disk (disclaimer: does not apply to low latency applications like AWS EBS, providers like Cloudflare, etc).
      - idlewords 12y ago
        Yeah, of course. I was kidding—briefly forgetting what site I was on.
shykes 12y ago
The first application that comes to mind is vehicles. Picture a car driving at full speed, or an airplane about to land. With a 10 second early warning, at the very least the driver/pilot could receive a clear visual and audible alert instructing it to slow down / abort approach, brace for impact, alert passengers, etc. Also: operators of heavy or dangerous machinery, surgeons, construction workers...
- idlewords 12y ago
  Terrific real-life example from Japan: http://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature122751 http://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature122751 "According to Higashi, only one train, running under test without passengers, derailed that day, when it was approaching Sendai, before it was immediately halted by the emergency braking."
tzs 12y ago
It's an interesting exercise to spend a day or two trying to be aware of what would be the most likely dangers where you are at the moment if you were caught in a good sizes quake right then. I think that most will find that there are many times each day where a few seconds warning would make a difference. Some common situations: • Carrying a heavy item that would hurt you if you dropped it on your foot, or fell down and it landed on you. • Sitting near a shelf with something heavy on it (surround speaker, for example). • Many things in the kitchen: carrying hot liquid; hot liquid on the stove; using a knife. • Using power tools: soldering; drilling; sawing. • Juggling torches. Just a couple seconds warning can give you time to put down a heavy object, move from where your speaker will fall on you or prepare to deflect it, get out of the way of potential spills in the kitchen, put down the knife, stop your power tools, and stop juggling.
- zevets 12y ago
  I attended a talk by one of the developers of this system, and since earthquake warnings are so short (tens of seconds), it's unlikely that traditional alert mechanisms can be delivered to the general public. As such, the primary consumers of the device will be places like nuclear power plants and major industrial operators who are willing to install special alarms. The other example he gave was giving doctors performing surgery time to step away from the patient, so that they dont turn things into a real life game of surgeon simulator, an example I personally find to be extremely horrifying and nightmare inducing.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    Cell phone app. Setup something like the reverse-911 system, or even just a downloadable app that can wake your phone from sleep and use the speakers to alert its carrier that an earthquake is on the way. Hell, maybe this is even a use for "Yo".
    - plainOldText 12y ago
      How about the delay? The message is not delivered instantly. Plus, such a system would be required to be already scaled up, and stay in that state always, to support sending messages to millions of "subscribers", which would only add additional delay.
bonestamp2 12y ago
Excellent point. It could, for example, switch off gas lines at various checkpoints. I wonder how that might that affect appliances? For example, if a hot water heater is heating and the flame goes out, but then the gas comes back on is the heater smart enough to re-ignite the gas (or shut it off)?
- omegaworks 12y ago
  Most things with a pilot light make use of a thermocouple to keep the gas from leaking out when no flame is present.
  - Filligree 12y ago
    A thermocouple which won't shut off the gas immediately. However (targeting this mostly at GP), the amount of gas which will leak should be absolutely minimal and will soon disperse into nonignitability.
rodgerd 12y ago
> A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans Ten seconds is plenty for me to drop under my work desk, or at least be well on the way. Similarly my daughter's school class. That can make a big difference to survivial rates.
Aqua_Geek 12y ago
> A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans [...] One of the things mentioned on the USGS site is doctors in surgery. Knowing even a couple of seconds in advance that you should pause the procedure could save lives.
xxs 12y ago
>> It might even be that 10 false positives a day are worth it to catch one real event, if the "safing" operation is relatively non-disruptive. This will cause so much panic that people will ignore them at some point. 10 false positives (even 1 a day) just make the system unreliable.
- UweSchmidt 12y ago
  OP seems to be talking about "automated systems". A harddisk might stop reading/writing for moment and park the heads to avoid a head-crash and things like that.
wellboy 12y ago
There should be an app for that --> Yo. Seriously, it should be a functionality of Yo. As of now you can subscribe to channels already, I think there should also be default channels that all users are subscribed to, for events that happens a few times a year and less.
nkozyra 12y ago
But how much time is left after processing and delivery latency? I wonder if it could go from warning to end user within those 10 seconds.
ctdonath 12y ago
Don't underestimate the value of people simply knowing what's happening. There's a big difference (translating to greater safety) between reactions of "WTF?" vs "here it comes!"
fludlight 12y ago
There's a Bay Area company with a commercial early warning system that is capable of just that! http://www.seismicwarning.com/about/overview.php http://www.seismicwarning.com/about/overview.php
jac_no_k 12y ago
In Japan, the alert is accompanied with magnitude and epicenter information. This alert seems to be also distributed by broadcast SMS. Apps on the phone determine if it crosses a threshold to alert or not. Even after the shaking has started, it's good to know just how strong it will be. So if it's 3am, I know whether I could ignore or I should do checks.

damian2000 12y ago

Japan's system ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_%28Japan%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_%28Jap...

melling 12y ago

To be clear, the detectors in Napa felt the tremors then transmitted the data to Berkeley. They got a 10 second warning because the tremors travel much slower than the speed of light. Being 10 seconds away means the quake is much less intense. This is helpful, but what we need is a warning for people within a few seconds of the epicenter.

idlewords 12y ago
The various types of seismic waves travel at different speeds. Luckily the most damaging are slowest, which travel at about half the speed of the fastest (~5 km/s). You can detect the fast waves and trigger warnings immediately, without having to wait for the damage to start. California is a little bit of a special case, in that quake damage falls off rapidly with distance (the rock is kind of broken up here and doesn't transmit energy well). Earthquakes east of the rockies, while rarer, also have a much bigger radius of damage. In areas like the New Madrid Seismic Zone you could get useful warning times on the order of minutes. Any early warning system is worth its weight in gold if it's automatically linked to infrastucture like gas mains and train signals (or data centers!). Even a few seconds warning can save lives. Unfortunately, like any other kind of public infrastructure besides roads, getting a decent warning system in place is politically impossibe in the US.

bigiain 12y ago

"The system works because while earthquakes travel at the speed of sound ..." That sounds like a somewhat misleading simplification or a complete misunderstanding. Presumably "the speed of sound in the earth" and "the speed at which earthquakes travel" is by definition the same - earthquakes just being "sound vibrations" in the earth with macro level amplitudes. I'd be very surprised if that was particularly close to what people think of as "the speed of sound" (which I'd assume means "about 350m/s").

Steuard 12y ago
Sure, and the warning signal doesn't travel at the full vacuum speed of light, either: part or all of its path goes through electronics, and electrical signals travel only something like 0.5c. But this is a really short article aiming to give readers the gist of how the system works. Referring to "the speed of sound" without specifying the material is still probably within an order of magnitude or so of being accurate, and I don't know how valuable greater precision would be in this context. (In any case, I'll wager that the number of people who 1) have a solid, intuitive understanding of the 350m/s speed of sound in air, but also 2) don't understand that earthquake wave speeds in rock are also essentially sound waves but travel significantly faster, is pretty low.)

fmela 12y ago

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/723/ http://xkcd.com/723/

juergen 12y ago
Very good one, especially in this context

byteCoder 12y ago

Of course, we never hear about all the times the system has given false positives.

wtallis 12y ago
Given the design of this system (it's an early warning system, not a prediction system), the false positive rate could easily be zero so far.

astrocat 12y ago

Yo. From EARTHQUAKE. [edit] tough crowd...

sergiosgc 12y ago
Jokes are frowned upon on HN. Everyone is bent on avoiding the slashdot slippery slope. Communities do learn with History...
etjossem 12y ago
Not sure why this was downvoted! Honestly, that's one of the best uses for Yo I've seen so far. Relatedly: http://www.earthquakeyo.com/ http://www.earthquakeyo.com/

hnriot 12y ago

I couldn't find how I could get this. I got a txt from the USGS but that was after the event and because I set up twitter to txt me that account, does anyone know how to get these early warnings? I woke up, but in SF it wasn't much of a big deal.

largote 12y ago

Japan, Mexico City, and other seismically active places, have such systems in place and have had them for years. Amazing that California, the epicenter of tech, is just getting on board with this.

rwg 12y ago
As someone who used to work for a university's geosciences department as a Unix sysadmin/programmer and who worked on two different seismic monitoring networks (one spread across the state for earthquake monitoring and one parked on top of a coal mine), allow me to explain why earthquake monitoring in the United States is largely stuck in the stone age: There's no f---ing money. Back in the '80s, there were a lot of regional seismic networks around the country, especially east of the Mississippi. But as time marched on and budgets got slashed, regional seismic networks disappeared one by one. Today, only the largest regional networks survive — generally the ones that are mostly funded by the states they're in and/or have increased their share of USGS/ANSS funding by taking over monitoring for areas of the country that used to be covered by the now-defunct networks. The regional seismic networks that are left spend pretty much all of their dollars on equipment and operations. Installing/upgrading/running permanent seismograph stations is expensive — a basic solar-powered one with a shallow fiberglass vault, a three component short period sensor, and a three channel digitizer will run you ~$12,000 just in equipment and materials. The sky's the limit if you go fancier than that (broadband sensors, strong motion sensors, atmospheric sensors, borehole sensors, six channel digitizer, elaborate vaults, VSAT, etc.). Then there's the recurring communications cost, the cost of regular site visits, the cost of regular battery replacements, replacing solar panels/equipment boxes that morons shoot at for laughs, etc. What I'm getting at is that in the monetary battles of "keep seismograph stations working" vs. "hire programmer to write useful software", the stations will win every time. Even this LA Times article about Berkeley's early warning system notes, "A lack of funds, however, has slowed the system's progress." If the epicenter of tech wants to do something wonderful for earthquake seismology, figure out how to make dirt cheap 1- or 3-channel seismic digitizers (low-pass filter + low noise amp + 20-bit ADC @ 100–200 accurately timestamped samples/s, ≤1 watt average power draw @ 12 VDC, speaks TCP/IP over 802.11g/n) and dirt cheap 1- or 3-component short period sensors (1 or 2 Hz corner frequency, decent sensitivity). Then figure out how to get thousands of these dirt cheap digitizers and sensors in backyards all over the country and contributing data in real-time to IRIS and/or the closest regional seismic network. If the cost of acquiring quality seismic data goes down, that frees up money to actually do something with the data. When I was still at the university job, my job-related pipe dream was to blanket the state with these non-existent dirt cheap stations. Even one or two per county in my state would've increased our station count by a factor of >15, greatly improved the quality of our earthquake locations, and allowed us to determine focal mechanisms (the orientation of the fault and direction of the slip) even for small earthquakes.

ghshephard 12y ago

Back in 1999/2000 I had a friend in Castro Valley call me in the morning to ask me if I was feeling the earthquake - I said nope, and then 5 seconds later - it hit me in Sunnyvale. That's another way of earthquake advance warning - taking advantage of the latency between the epicenter and the surrounding area.

miguelrochefort 12y ago
This is exactly what the system does...
- ghshephard 12y ago
  I realized that after reading the threads, and some related articles. I don't really understand why anybody felt a need to "announce" that the early warning system, "Worked" - I would presume that it has always been the case (at least since tele-connected seismometers were invented) that there has been an early warning of every earthquake from sites that were remote to where the sensors were. Presumably this is Earthquake Monitoring/Alert systems 101. (And, in Japan they've greatly advanced the signaling to the public)

itazula 12y ago

10 seconds can be a lifesaver for someone doing construction on a high-rise building.

phreeza 12y ago

There should be a kaggle challenge for this, I would love to give that data a shot.

adalyac 12y ago

So... why is it (geologically) not possible to predict an earthquake earlier than 10 seconds? Anyone know of research trying to beat that?

jordanthoms 12y ago
They're not actually predicting the earthquake - just detecting it as soon as it happens, and transmitting a signal out faster than the earthquake waves travel. So to beat that requires actually predicting when it will happen beforehand, which nobody has made any real headway on in a long time.
lutusp 12y ago
It's not a prediction if the earthquake has already begun. The linked article explains that they were able to give ten seconds' warning only because a sensor near the epicenter was able to send an alert at the speed of light, thus beating the seismic waves, which travel at a much slower speed. About prediction research, so far there are too few ways to gather relevant data for processes deep within the earth, and too little theoretical knowledge. This should be an attractive field for someone with enough physical and scientific training and a willingness to do difficult research.
peter303 12y ago
Its called "early warning". Hopefully sensors near the earthquake will warn humans miles away.

helperdev 12y ago

10 seconds might be enough time to trigger a custom alert on iPhones and Droids with a specific alarm that an earthquake is imminent. Enough time to get under a table.

blunte 12y ago

This post is a nice reminder of the privacy issues (and how users should really consider what information they choose to give away). Yes scientifically this is interesting. But it also means that we are willingly allowing ourselves to be tracked to great detail. You know they have internal reports or queries to show who has sex and when. Not that this is a big deal - we're human, and humans have sex. But it also can show who is having sex with whom, in some cases. How long until Jawbone starts receiving court requests for this? (probably already happens).

oldspiceman 12y ago

I was in an earthquake in Hiroshima a few months ago. When the shaking started I was really confused. If my phone was blaring "earthquake" it would have been helpful. Also, the warning on my iPhone was in Japanese and it was impossible to copy and paste it into a translator it so it was useless.

peter303 12y ago

"QuakeFinder" is crowdsourcing earthquake warning system. It uses accelerometers in laptops, tablets, smartphones and special PC boards. The hypothesis is that tens of thousands of networked accelerometers with so-so signals may be useful for seismology, compared to few hundred professional seismometers drilled into bedrock. I saw some promising early studies, but lost track of the project.

peter303 12y ago
The original accelerometers were supposed to save laptop disks before a laptop hit the ground. But then Apple put them into smartphones to measure orientation and location. Their cost has fallen to a few dimes.

PMan74 12y ago

Low tech solution: http://asset-c.soup.io/asset/2982/0993_c492.gif http://asset-c.soup.io/asset/2982/0993_c492.gif

robbyking 12y ago
Both of my dogs (aged 12 and 14, respectively) slept right through it.

whyleym 12y ago

This could be very interesting if the 10 second timescale could be increased - as it stands 10 seconds is not enough time to do anything meaningful other than potentially crawl under your desk. I know little of the science behind earthquakes and the movement of tectonic plates, however it would seem that if 10 seconds warning is possible today then further longer periods of time in the future could help people and or the technology surrounding building's and the infrastructure within the building to ready themselves/itself for the onset of an earthquake.