8 ms·

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 aut

by 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.

by rdl 12y ago

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.