6.4 Earthquake hits Taiwan | Hacker News Reader

6.4 Earthquake hits Taiwan

earthquake.usgs.gov

126 pointssingularity200154 comments

If you find yourself looking for a quick way to gauge the impact to people and property from an earthquake like this, I suggest you look for the USGS's PAGER report:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000chhc...

They put this type of report together for each significant quake and it will inform you very quickly about how concerned you should be. In this case, both the Estimated Fatalities and Estimated Economic Losses are in the green bands, so nearly everyone should be ok even if they feel a bit shaken (ahem).

Thank you. This is exactly what most people need, I feel. Much appreciated and very useful.

I was on a video chat with an engineer in Taichung when it happened. The bicycle hanging from his ceiling was shaking pretty aggressively. He guessed it was a 5 and was on the third floor of his 40 year old townhouse across the island from the epicenter.

I'm visiting Taipei at the moment. Received these alerts on the phone a few minutes before the earthquake woke me up around midnight:

https://i.imgur.com/v08yD9l.png

Are they from a specific service, or it's a national/governmental system?

It’s from Taiwan’s earthquake early warning system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_warning_system

An annoying detail with the iOS implementation is the lack of a "copy message text" function - I wanted to paste the text into Google Translate...

The first one you received (the one is the bottom) said there is an earthquake in progress expecting certain areas to feel the shocks with level 4.

The next one is the earthquake information after it happens.

As a workaround: Google Translate, at least on Android, has a camera button on the bottom left of the text box, there you can do live translation of what's on the camera (AR style above the original text), or simply upload an existing image from your device. You can upload that screenshot and see the translation.

I think if you took a screenshot you could then submit the image to Google translate.

how strong was it in Taipei?

It felt like relatively high-amplitude lateral movements, but at the same time they weren't violent. No shaking - it was more like the building was moving around on a giant waterbed.

I wonder why it is called a "presidential alert" while it has nothing to do with one.

Its an alert setting. basically you can turn off the other alert types, but not the presidential one.

It is a US phone on a non-US network. The cell broadcast messages may have been flagged the same as a "presidential alert" in the US but it would have a different meaning locally (e.g. "government alert", "emergency alert"). I believe the message type is just a "spare" numeric identifier that isn't defined consistently between the US, Europe, and elsewhere.

Great. So like numerics in the IRC protocol, everyone does their own, and if you’re lucky some overlap.

More specifically, as to the US category it got lumped in, Presidential alerts are the highest priority in the Wireless Emergency Alert system, followed by alerts for extreme then several imminent danger to life, followed by AMBER Alerts.

So, its not surprising that a top-priority message would show as a Presidential Alert in a US phone if the same basic technology and rough semantics are used.

probably because taiwaneses like to poke the PRC goverment and remind them all the time that they have a president?

Here's a Google translation:

https://i.imgur.com/TWZLwVY.png

I have many friends living there, and loads of them say this was the longest/strongest they remember feeling. Hope everyone is okay, the place is set up to be resilient, but you never know until things happen....

Yep, it was strongest I've felt in 4 years of living here.

There has also been a bunch of smaller earthquakes happening regularly over the last few days.

the place is set up to be resilient

I wish that were more true. In 2016, 116 people died in a building that collapsed in Tainan.

"Reuters witnesses at the scene of the collapse have seen large rectangular, commercial cans of cooking-oil packed inside wall cavities exposed by the damage, apparently having been used as building material.

Taiwan media has also reported the presence of polystyrene in supporting beams, mixed in with concrete."[1]

---

"The municipality has mobilized a team of engineers and architects to survey the city and tag potentially dangerous buildings, marking at least 340 buildings at risk in the event of another earthquake.

Of these 340, only 319 have been completely surveyed, with 48 found to be highly threatened buildings and 45 threatened buildings.

The Kaohsiung City Government also designated two engineers to determine its threat level in the event of an earthquake, with only 14 at-risk buildings reported.

All 14 have been surveyed, with two considered highly threatened and one threatened in the event of an earthquake, the city government said." [2]

---

It's very likely more people will die in future earthquakes due to cost-cutting construction.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-quake-taiwan-crime/taiwan...

[2] http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2016/02/14/2...

Is it going to affect hardware prices?

You are downvoted, but after concern for the affected twianeese, this was also my first thought. And most likely some impact is inevitable. Signifigant or not, to our admittedly biased, career/hobby remains to be determined.

> You are downvoted, but after concern for the affected twianeese, this was also my first thought.

This is relevant. Prices soared across the industry after the 1999 quake. I believe prices rose several hundred dollars for individual PCs for most / all manufacturers.

https://www.wired.com/1999/09/pc-prices-ram-upward/

I think the Taiwanese companies we can think of (huge ODMs like Quanta and Foxconn) do almost all of their manufacturing in China, not Taiwan.

Edit: oops, not Samsung of course.

How is Samsung Taiwanese?

Samsung is Korean

TSMC is based in Taiwan... If that's not 'huge', I'm not sure what is.

Yeah, most of the advanced chip fabs are still located in Taiwan for strategic/political reasons

TSMC did suffer complete loss of like 60% of production batches on few occasions in the past and recovered after them just fine. And so did companies in their supply chain. Actually, it is even more painful say for wafer suppliers: a few seconds electricity loss at a silicon smelter or growth vessel means 1 month revenue is lost.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2016/02/29/the-taiwanese-...

I guess, people are already running to short TSMC, Qualcomm and Apple

This is precisely where you should be sharing a news article versus merely pointing to data. People want to know the impact it had, not just a number/value.

Here's a reliable source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42966916

I disagree. The OP pointed to the perfect source for his title, showing the origin of the data.

The Richter scale measures and describes impacts, so you already know the impact from the 6.4 rating itself.

For 6.0 to 6.9:

> Damage to a moderate number of well-built structures in populated areas. Earthquake-resistant structures survive with slight to moderate damage. Poorly designed structures receive moderate to severe damage. Felt in wider areas; up to hundreds of miles/kilometers from the epicenter. Strong to violent shaking in epicentral area.

Also, your link added very little info, and the only mention of the building toppling (the infamous impacts) are in the title, with no reports, photos, or witness accounts (as of yet).

I like that the OP didn't fall into voyeurism, that the title was enough to inform me that a strong earthquake happened in Taiwan, and that the source was enough to confirm it.

For the rest, I'll have the evening news, or BBC articles, but I don't think I need them here on HN or that they were needed for this particular piece of information, at this point in time.

pedantry: technically the USGS doesn't use the Richter scale anymore

Anyway: exactly how much damage an earthquake does varies wildly with exactly where it hits and what sort of shaking it produces and what time of day it is and the technical data doesn't always capture it perfectly. You can't know whether buildings actually did collapse (and were there people inside? how many?) without actual reporting.

Also geology is very important. Bedrock vs landfill will significantly affect impact. Marina distract vs Laurel Heights.

The USGS data clearly tries to make intelligent guesses in that direction (they try to guess at shaking, and local population, and local building standards, etc to predict the damage) but imho what matters is what actually happened rather than what the USGS computers think could have happened, and reports of building collapses are probably more "real" than whatever the USGS thinks is likely.

True, but I was also hinting at the fact that the other reported article does not really provide much in terms of reporting.

Also, this is HN: pedantry is built-in. Not saying it's a feature, but I guess it was a manufacturing defect I've gotten accustomed to. I don't mind. To each to have their own filter :)

Every countries and even regions building practices are different and will be affected differently. Even the distribution of new vs old buildings will take part in how much damage is actually done. USGS doesn't have any of that info and it's just as important as the power of the event itself.

Yep - a 6.4 in central Italy with lots of old stone buildings would be very deadly. In Japan, it'd do much less damage.

The Richter scale measures and describes impacts, so you already know the impact from the 6.4 rating itself.

I'm sorry, this is not quite true. The Richter scale measures the amplitude of seismic waves; the description you highlight is what might be expected generally, but doesn't give us any indication of the actual on-the-ground impact that any particular quake might have.

You're right, and my grammar was indeed incorrect: I did not mean to say that it measure the impacts but instead that it measures the amplitude of the quake, and also describes the impacts (which may or may not originally be true, but is how I've always seen it taught in classrooms, at least where I'm from). I guess I did remember it being closer to the model of the Beaufort scale for wind strength (which is more about the description than an actual measure of speed, originally).

And of course it does not give a precise description of the actual impacts for a given event, but I don't think it's generally far off the bat. But I'm no seismologist.

It doesn't measure the impact. For instance, 7.0 earthquakes can have a vastly different effect depending on the depth of the epicenter, the length of the earthquake, proximity to populated areas, proximity to faults.

EG:

https://apnews.com/d4217c33c5124972845022441d69728c

> The Richter scale measures and describes impacts, so you already know the impact from the 6.4 rating itself.

This is moment magnitude, not Richter. Specifically, 6.4 "Mww", or "Moment magnitude derived from a centroid moment tensor inversion of the W-phase", whatever that means. [1]

[1] https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/terms.php

I disagree, but thank you for sharing the news link. Here is a second one: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3358081

A property of the HN submission system afaik is that you submit one, and only one link. For that purpose, one "merely pointing to data" is a very good default.

There's a hundred "softer" links to choose from among international press, but which one to pick? Better let those fill the comments, rather than steer the whole thread.

(for the record, my girlfriend's aunt lives in Hualien, and I have visited several times - I'm in no way emotionally indifferent to this event)

>>> The earthquake happened on the second anniversary of another 6.4 magnitude one in 2016, which killed 116 people.

That's odd and interesting

If you find it odd an interesting, there was a similar coincidence in Mexico, two quakes hitting on the same date, but 32 years apart:

- On Sep 19, 2017 - 7.1 magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Central_Mexico_earthquake - On Sep 19, 1985 - 8.0 magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Mexico_City_earthquake

Odds of two people in a room having the same birthday?

Where the room is Taiwan, and the people in the room are the earthquakes in Taiwan.

Could an earthquake affect any space rocket launch? (like Space X Falcon one coming in few minutes?)

Will China send them help of any kind since they consider Taiwan a part of the country?

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/213...

They offered, but it was refused.

Would it affect any hi tech production like hard drives or memory?

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