
Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt - damian2000
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-earthquake-earlywarning-system-gave-10second-alert-before-napa-quake-felt-20140824-story.html
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rdl
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.

~~~
tzs
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
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
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
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.

~~~
VMG
If you use broadcast messages, the number of subscribers shouldn't matter.
There already exists a system like this in the US:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Mobile_Alert_System](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Mobile_Alert_System)

> CMAS will allow federal agencies to accept and aggregate alerts from the
> President of the United States, the National Weather Service (NWS) and
> emergency operations centers, and send the alerts to participating wireless
> providers who will distribute the alerts to their customers with compatible
> devices via Cell Broadcast, a technology similar to SMS text messages that
> simultaneously delivers messages to all phones using a cell tower instead of
> individual recipients.[3][4]

~~~
rdl
Will CMAS/cell broadcast bypass iOS Amber Alert and Emergency Alert
"Government Alert" settings?

~~~
Sanddancer
No. This would almost assuredly be sent as a level 2 extreme alert. The only
alert that can bypass the settings is an alert directly from the president.

~~~
diminoten
Well don't freaking turn off earthquake alerts!

~~~
jessaustin
If earthquake alerts are their own category, I probably won't. However, if
they're lumped in with much more common events (thunderstorm! non-custodial
parent spending time with child!) that I don't care to hear, then I will.

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melling
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
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.

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damian2000
Japan's system ...
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_%28Jap...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_%28Japan%29)

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largote
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
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.

~~~
michaelt
How cheap is dirt cheap? $1000? $100? $10? $1? $0.1?

Are there established algorithms to determine what seismic data is
'interesting' as opposed to streaming it all in real time (and keeping the
radio on) constantly?

Why 802.11n instead of cell phone networks - don't you need to be away from
traffic vibrations, and hence roads and homes?

~~~
rwg
_How cheap is dirt cheap? $1000? $100? $10? $1? $0.1?_

I think a sub-$500 per-station cost would be wonderful, but this is all just a
pipe dream...

 _Are there established algorithms to determine what seismic data is
'interesting' as opposed to streaming it all in real time (and keeping the
radio on) constantly?_

Almost all digitizers I've seen support the same STA/LTA (short term average ÷
long term average) triggering mechanism, where data is declared interesting if
the energy over a short time window divided by the energy over a long time
window exceeds some configurable threshold. If you only send triggered data,
it's a great way to trigger repeatedly on local noise and miss all/parts of
events you actually want to record.

Sending continuous data from stations to a central processing site is greatly
preferred, especially since the data rate is so low. Three channels of 20-bit,
100 samples/s data from a low- to moderate-noise site that's losslessly
compressed by the digitizer fits comfortably in 9600 bits/s.

 _Why 802.11n instead of cell phone networks - don 't you need to be away from
traffic vibrations, and hence roads and homes?_

Siting seismograph stations is a tradeoff. Too far away from civilization and
you have no way to get data back home except via (expensive, power hungry)
VSAT or high power radios. Too close to civilization and you are subjected to
civilization's noise (but you can use civilization's communications
infrastructure to send your data home, sometimes for free).

The higher a site's noise level, the higher your event detection threshold
gets. In other words, the noise consumes the signal from weak and/or distant
earthquakes. You can make up for this somewhat by deploying a more dense
network that pushes stations closer to where the earthquakes are happening...

------
ghshephard
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
This is exactly what the system does...

~~~
ghshephard
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)

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PMan74
Low tech solution:
[http://asset-c.soup.io/asset/2982/0993_c492.gif](http://asset-c.soup.io/asset/2982/0993_c492.gif)

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

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peter303
"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
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.

------
oldspiceman
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.

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

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whyleym
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.

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helperdev
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.

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hnriot
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.

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

~~~
jordanthoms
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.

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

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fmela
Relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/723/](http://xkcd.com/723/)

~~~
juergen
Very good one, especially in this context

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astrocat
Yo. From EARTHQUAKE.

[edit] tough crowd...

~~~
sergiosgc
Jokes are frowned upon on HN. Everyone is bent on avoiding the slashdot
slippery slope. Communities do learn with History...

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

~~~
wtallis
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.

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blunte
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).

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bigiain
"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
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.)

