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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

Question: What's the fastest earthquake notification source publicly available? I ask because USGS seems to have a 5-10 minute delay, whereas I'm hoping for less (ideally a few seconds).

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I was also hoping to create an early warning system and at least wake me out of bed a few seconds before an earthquake hits so I'm at least on the way to sheltering myself from falling objects.

The response I got from USGS was this:

> You can read our FAQ on that at https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-fast-does-earthquake-informati....

> You may also be interested in ShakeAlert - see https://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/.

So in short, no, they don't really have it yet. I wonder though if we (hackers) could create a realtime system for the bay area since USGS has been on it for years without results. About 20-50 sensors scattered in homes around the bay would probably be enough for an early warning system. Warnings can be delivered via a mobile app, or some kind of realtime API that anyone can use for their own purposes (e.g. stopping machinery, sounding building alarms, ...).

Thanks! It's nice to see someone finally address my question head-on. I feel the same way as you -- I can't fathom why it's taking them so long. Sad to hear nothing exists yet, but glad it's not just me being unable to find something.

If you want to do this, look to Japan.

I'm not working in this field, but I know they put a lot of effort into not just the geology, but also the psychology of warnings, esp. compared to acceptable false positive rates.

They were able to warn everyone in real-time when North Korea launched those missiles. A quick search turned up this article that the J-Alert system is not perfect: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/04/10/national/japans...

Write a bot that detects earthquake-related tweets, a la xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/723/

I've actually done this and get notifications usually 30 seconds post quake just like xkcd suggested.

I thought of that but 30 seconds is too long for an early warning system, the waves travel pretty fast.

The only way to get notification of an earhquake in time is a prediction system.

Depending on where the epicenter is, it may take 1-2 minutes for the S waves (which are the slower, damaging ones) to travel to the major population center. Up to 30s of warning for an earthquake early warning system is enough for people to take cover and for cities to shut off things like water/gas lines. That being said my system is definitely not ready for that, and twitter can be seen as one source of information used to augment other early detection systems.

You can get small raspberry pi based seismographs from https://raspberryshake.org/ ... could be interesting to integrate it with a small alarms or web/mobile apps that go off when it detects p-wave/s-wave arrivals with amplitudes above a user-specified threshold (so its not going off every day with smaller/distant events that are not felt by humans at the measurement location)

> I was also hoping to create an early warning system and at least wake me out of bed a few seconds before an earthquake hits so I'm at least on the way to sheltering myself from falling objects.

Wouldn't it be safer to not put objects that might fall above your bed?

he might have a roof

...which you also can't really get out from under in a few seconds.

I'm also not really sure what I could actually do to "shelter" myself in that timeframe.

If you google "earthquake-proof bed" you'll find at least one way to avoid getting crushed by (a typical) falling roof.

We have it, it was tested out just yesterday.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/10/17/20919639/ca...

The USGS has a RabbitMQ broker for distributing early alerts but it's not available to the general public.

It seems like they should just allow one or two vetted members of the public access to the broker, and then they can re-broadcast it to whoever wants it (with strong disclaimers about reliability)

That's pretty much what they're doing, the city of LA and the state of CA (by way of UC Berkeley) have their own apps that I believe are just rebroadcasting that data

If you haven't, take a look at the crowd sourced real-time lightning maps. Loads if sensors are scattered world-wide triangulating lightning strikes - there are even websites that estimate the sound wave as it grows & you'll hear the thunder right as the circle envelopes your location. Very fun to play around with during storms!

It sounds like they have it, ShakeAlert, they just don't give access to the public for some reason.

I found this document that has some interesting technical details https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2018/1155/ofr20181155.pdf

The newly updated MyShake app detects seismic events using peoples cell phones, then sends notifications to people nearby 5-10 seconds before the shock waves arrive.

https://myshake.berkeley.edu/

> MyShake uses a neural network to decide which motion is produced by earthquakes and which isn’t.

Thanks, but oh man... I've tried this a year or two ago, but I was hoping there would be something that wouldn't require my phone to have constant data connectivity? I turn it off sometimes especially at home/work. :\

Edit: I'm also not sure how much battery it uses... hopefully the battery-saver mode won't use much?

How would something like this work without connectivity?

I didn't say without connectivity, I just said without phone data connectivity. Email would be best, SMS could work too.

Email doesn't work without phone data

Sure it does? It goes to my computer.

Ah geez. I was assuming you wanted the alerts to be sent to your mobile while you were away from home.

And your assumption was right. The original premise was "how can I get notified within seconds after tremors occur" and not "please send an email for me to read when I happen to use a desktop PC".

Some people spend most of their day on their laptops and try to limit phone time. People in this thread are all assuming everyone does things they way they do, but not all people are the same.

Email delivery can easily be delayed 1-2 minutes. I’m not sure it’s the best method for an early warning system.

I usually get my emails instantly, but if they get delayed, then they get delayed. At least a chance of getting a notification quickly is far better than nothing.

A mix of technologies might help: say 10 cellphones in a given area detect a tremor, they start communicating each other via mesh WiFi (long range BT, LoRa if available etc.) their data and if one of them is connected to the Internet, it packs all data and send it to a central server where it is matched with other (groups of) cellphones data and evaluated if an alert is to be sent. If yes, it can use the same path (central server->Internet->connected phone->phones nearby) plus broadcasting an alert to other media sources, TV, radio etc. All it would need is one cellphone to be connected at a time, which in non rural areas should be almost the norm today. Also, the amount of data sent and received would be trivial so it wouldn't impact connectivity costs.

In Japan you can get early earthquake notifications, before the seismic waves arrive, via area broadcast.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Ja...

I agree, having an API or some such would be nice; I don't usually carry around a phone indoors when I have massive screens available to me, and also put my phone in airplane mode while sleeping.

The system only works because people run the app on their phones to produce the data.

FWIW this app failed to detect an earthquake yesterday that I felt in Mountain View (the origin was in Hollister). I think they still have some fine-tuning.

Almost certainly they detected the earthquake and decided not to notify people because it was too small to warrant a notification.

Almost certainly, that's pure conjecture.

The article I read announcing statewide rollout actually goes into some detail regarding what threshold the quake has to hit for notifying people. I found it interesting, because I had initially expected it to send out warnings for every quake. Some people complained that the app didn’t warn them about quakes they felt that had been quite mild, so they lowered the threshold for alert to more closely conform to people’s expectations (even though that level of shaking was very minor and not necessary to warn people about).

[0] https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/10/17/20919639/ca...

Yesterday, on the anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, they tested out an early warning system hooked up to the system that drives Amber alerts. This will deliver warning of an impending earthquake, tens of seconds before an earthquake hits (in supported areas, like SF) due to the propagation speed differences between an earthquake's P-wave and S-waves.

(Japan has had such a system in place since the 90's, and will stop bullet trains and surgeries just before the earthquake hits.)

My phone got the alert half an hour after the advertised alert window (advertised: 5:15 to 5:45, actual: 6:15), so that’s not great.

Haha, well we just had an earthquake a few minutes ago here in Los Angeles. It was up on Reddit /r/losangeles within a few seconds.

Yep, just woke me up. Here's the seismograph from Occidental college: https://apps.oxy.edu/ws/seismoday.aspx

For the life of me, I can't work out the axes on that graph.

Seismographs have time on the X axis and magnitude on the Y. This one wraps the X axis so each line across the paper is 15min.

I live in Greece and often I check: https://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/

It appears to have quite immediate reporting, in the region of couple of minutes.

Twitter.

Seriously. If you can get a real-time feed of all tweets with the word “earthquake” it should be pretty easy to detect all ~4+ magnitude earthquakes in (moderately? heavily?) populated areas.

Exactly. And Twitter is also in the best position to build a dedicated alert system since many times they have the mobile location of each user tweeting. They could even have the app tell the user to then set the phone on a flat surface and use that to try and crowdsource a magnitude/validate the quake. I don't think any other company/org is in a position to be even remotely as accurate than Twitter is for real-time.

If a bad enough erathquake hit the network would probably malfunction or overload due to distress and "are you OK" calls. I guess there is need for satelite or some long wave RF system.

The Earthquake Alert! app on Android showed me the recent earthquake about 1 minute after the event - the time it took to figure out what's happening, get the phone, unlock, fire up the app, etc.

Sounds like room for improvement: Shout "earthquake" through the phone's speakers (overriding any volume setting), flash "earthquake" on the screen (turning the screen on if necessary, but if that takes a second, don't have it delay the sound output but do it in parallel), and especially without unlocking or opening the app.

Something like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKhFCMO78OE

Why do you need to fire up the app? Are you looking to receive alerts or send them?

I wrote a script that monitors twitter for earthquake related tweets and notifies me when a certain threshold is hit. It pretty reliably notifies me 20-30s post-quake. Main problem is that very few tweets actually have location data associated with them. I try to grab the location string users can specify in their bio and infer the location based on the most common occurrence in a body of tweets- works decently well although its usually a broader region.

California has a earthquake warning system they started just publicizing. http://earthquake.ca.gov/mobile-application/ Its been a few years in the making. Also it will give warnings only if close to your proximity by cellular location.

I'm not meaning to be obtuse and I've only experienced a few earthquakes first-hand, but why would you need a near real-time notification? It's kind of obvious when one is happening in your vicinity and if it's not nearby why would the delay matter?

One reason is that I've noticed sometimes it takes me a few seconds to be able to tell if it's genuinely an earthquake or if something else is causing a vibration, and sometimes it actually takes a few seconds for it to become noticeable... then a few seconds on top of that for me to figure out how to react. Any kind of confirmation notification at that point would be extremely helpful to snap me into action and avoid needless delays.

Another reason is that, well, I might be asleep, and ideally I'd prefer to wake up with a notification, rather than (say) with something falling on my head...

1) Tsunami early warning system. The difference of 30 seconds might be enough to save a life. 5-10 minutes might save many more?

2) Stabilize machinery, close windows, blinds, turn off gas, start emergency generator in hospital. I'm sure the financial people would be able to sell stocks with earlier notice than others!

The real-time notifications to cell phones in Japan are faster than the actual seismic waves, so if it's a decently sized earthquake a little ways away, it gives you a 5-15 second head start

Shinkansens apply full breaks automatically if dangerous earthquake is detected (there are about 50 on the way just between Osaka and Tokyo). Thanks to this system many trainsets will already be stationary when the seismic waves hit them.

Usually I see the earthquake on the USGS recent earthquake feed within a minute of feeling the event.

Wouldn't SMS fit the bill?

Everyone has it and it's quick to send out if you have the system set up for it.

Yes, as a system for publishing. But it's only a way to transfer the notification, not a source.

SMS isn't a notification source, it's a communication medium.

> HTTP isn't a notification source, it's a communication medium.

> WebSockets isn't a notification source, it's a communication medium.

> Email isn't a notification source, it's a communication medium.

Seems like sometimes communication mediums are being used as notification sources. And that's fine.

It's used for urgent notification of the public by the Norwegian government and municipalities. It's also very easy to accurately target specific areas as all the numbers are registered with the address of the owner.

The benefit is that you don't need any infrastructure except for the phone network so there are very few servers that can go down etc.

Edit: I see my error!, Yes it's not a source. Never mind my comments :)

Twitter lol

You just dont get magnitude, depth and location data

You can also make your own seismoter, its not complicated but everything makes them go off

Excusing the commentor's misuse of grammar and punctuation: I'm Not sure why this comment is being down voted.

I haven't done the research, but is @rolltide incorrect in his assertion that you can get certain data from USGS (such as magnitude, depth, and location)? That information is available on the USGS website.

Or are people down-voting him/her because of the claim of making your own seismoter? (rolltitde did misspel seismometer).

For one, twitter can't give you a notification for an earthquake.

It sounds like they just meant random people tweeting about earthquakes the moment they happen, instead of actual data or reliable notifications.

> Excusing the commentor's misuse of grammar and punctuation: I'm Not sure why this comment is being down voted.

I downvoted it for "Twitter lol".

1) The "lol" is unnecessary and juvenile

2) The statement indicates that either using Twitter should somehow be obvious, or that the poster is not taking the posed question seriously

On balance, it pulls the level of discourse down, which is my (and the proper) criteria for a downvote.

> I downvoted it for "Twitter lol".

I would appreciate that you not censor other people comments over such trivial things.

Because it's really annoying to everyone else. And thus rude.

seems the consensus is that it's not inaccurate, they just didn't like the format of the contribution

so you can learn a lot from downvote censored comments on this site

@earthquakesLA is very quick to post info

Edit: for example...

“A 3.7 magnitude earthquake occurred 0mi WSW of Compton, CA. Details: http://eqbot.com/2iV Map: http://eqbot.com/2ii”

I've got the googley eyes seismometer on my fridge.

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