researchers are pushing hard to put an earthquake warning system
Trains Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in San Francisco are not running at 3:20 on August 24, when a magnitude 6 earthquake shook the region. But BART's computers were working - and they knew what was going to happen 10 seconds before the earth began to shake, thanks to an alert warning system prototype in California. The earthquake occurred in the middle of the day, computers are loaded trains to stop slowly - potentially prevent derailment and save the lives of passengers.
With this scenario in mind, researchers are pushing for a much broader connect the west coast of the United States band from California to Washington, with an earthquake warning system in its own right. The project of the United States of $ 120 million is funded is not yet guaranteed, but the last earthquake, centered near Napa, California, which caused the damage value of several hundred million dollars, political fortunes could tip your favor. Seismologists and managers of emergency services will discuss the practical aspects of implementing these systems at a conference on 3 September at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I hope the Napa earthquake has created a sense of urgency," said Alex Padilla, a senator from the state of California who represents a district near Los Angeles. Padilla filed a bill that Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law last September, which gives the state until 2016 to implement an early warning system before the expiry of the legislation.
However, the law does not specify that the $ 80 million for the portion of the system would come from California. That puts us at a crossroads seismologists: if they are not able to push through an early warning system in time, could fight for everything.
Several countries, including Mexico and Japan have extensive systems to protect key infrastructure alert. And Istanbul, seismic sensors allow a major supplier of natural gas from Turkey to close its pipelines if the plant is about to start shaking. Similar warnings flow of nuclear power plants in Romania.
California has the backbone of a warning system - ShakeAlert, a project led by a consortium of universities and the Geological Survey project (USGS). The system uses real-time information from seismic waves reach the sensor network in California to send warnings that the most damaging secondary waves, are underway. Alerts are scientists and about 150 organizations, emergency managers and other testers.
ShakeAlert developed with 6.5 million philanthropic dollars Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, California, but that money will run next year. So far, no one with money to become a mature operating system. In an ideal world, the USGS years have implemented a federal electoral system warning, said Thomas Heaton, seismologist of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
And the system works. In the recent earthquake in Napa (see "History repeats itself") ShakeAlert provided about 10 seconds warning to San Francisco, which is about 50 km from the epicenter. "If it is not a sufficient demonstration of the system for financing the implementation of their own, size does an earthquake have to be?" When asked Richard Allen, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
ShakeAlert developed with 6.5 million philanthropic dollars Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, California, but that money will run next year. So far, no one with money to become a mature operating system. In an ideal world, the USGS years have implemented a federal electoral system warning, said Thomas Heaton, seismologist of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
But the USGS budgets were declining for years, and the United States, probably will end up with at least part of the bill. In the spirit of Heaton, this is not an ideal solution, because states do not have the resources or experience: with the support of the state is "like Florida runs an early warning system for hurricanes," he said.
Padilla and other politicians tried to get money through various infrastructure projects to improve the existing seismic network in California and add hundreds of new stations. An earthquake early warning system will never be perfect: there will always be a dead zone, an area very close to the shock of receiving a warning. But this area can be reduced by adding stations and network upgrades, Allen said.
For example, the decade old sensor closest to the epicenter of Napa seismic station took 2.8 seconds to record tremor, process and transmit network that monitors earthquakes in California. The sensor was, I could do all this in just 0.3 seconds - fast enough to alert the city of Napa that an earthquake was imminent, which allows residents to dive for cover, Allen said.
To be most effective, the warning network is also required to connect to the infrastructure, as it does for computers BART. "We're really talking about a system of command and control of modern," says Heaton. "For our seismic networks is something that trains and elevators and other automatically controlled, we need a team of software developers working for several years," he says.
This connectivity becomes even more important were California to integrate your system with the most seismic networks in northern Oregon and Washington. There, the area of the Cascadia fault off has the potential to trigger a big quake as magnitude 9 Fault is relatively far from the cities, if an early warning system could give minutes custody in Portland, Seattle or Vancouver.
Expansion in Oregon and Washington, it would take 40 million years. Seismologists in the region are designed to test alerts using testers - both as ShakeAlert done - next spring, said John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“We don’t want to wait until we have a major damaging earthquake with hundreds of fatalities,” says Allen. “We want to build it now.”
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