Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
latimes.com
latimes.com
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.
Hot water heaters and book cases - Yes. But not fridges. They rarely tip over in earthquakes.
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.)
After feeling a lot of them, you start to be able to guess their distance and severity based on the P-wave vs S-wave timing of what you feel. It's kind of like counting seconds after seeing lighting until you hear thunder except you have 2 components:
I would expect if they used it for earthquakes as it is I would get the alert on the East Coast and someone in California wouldn't.
For a while they were triggering various alerts (including EBS interruptions on radio and TV), with a frequency that lead me to strongly discount such warnings.
Emergencies should be reserved for circumstances in which the recipient of a message can and should take immediate action. An alert is just that: an advisory. Run these was an item in normal newscasts, or in advisory systems (including if you absolutely must, highway signage). But not distracting people.
The fact that, at least in my recollection, a huge number of Amber Alerts appear to involve immediate family / partner situations (boyfriend/girlfriend, other parent, husband/wife, modulo estrangement). Most seem to resolve reasonably well. And I'm not sure that a full-on aggressive response benefits the situation. Again, that's a recollection and personal perception. But overall, I'm underimpressed by the system.
This seems to have improved somewhat in more recent years.
[0] http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/08/30/4275356/amber-al...
That is: adults are less likely to ride bikes if they're required to wear a helmet (as I understand, laws for minors would remain), but the health benefits of increased activity and cycling outweigh the risks of injury.
open http://www.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/2ec8v5/forget_b...
I'm open to arguments over flawed methodology or other issues, but the point is that sometimes there are apparent safety measures that, when taken, increase risks. Another case in point would be TSA airport security measures, which by encouraging more trips to be made by automobile, have arguably increased overall death risks to travelers (as reported by Bruce Schneier and others). I'm among those who've either foregone or elected to drive on journeys rather than fly, even aware of the risks (and, frankly, if you've got the time, it's often far more interesting and enjoyable).
The US Department of Justice reports 685 successful recoveries, though it doesn't list the number of activations of the Amber Alert system, nor whether or not the recoveries were materially aided by the system.
http://www.amberalert.gov/statistics.htm
Edit: A more complete set of statistics and resolutions from 2002-2011 is given here, including ativation requests received but not resulting in alerts: http://www.statisticbrain.com/amber-alert-statistics/
According to that, there had been 190 activations (fewer than I'd thought), 77 were parental abductions (about 35%), acquaintances 55, strangers, 37. Another 355 alert requests were made but not activated.
The Wikipedia article on the Amber Alert system raises a number of the points I've mentioned above:
"A Scripps Howard study of the 233 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States in 2004 found that most issued alerts did not meet the Department of Justice's criteria. Fully 50% (117 alerts) were categorized by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as being "family abductions", very often a parent involved in a custody dispute. There were 48 alerts for children who had not been abducted at all, but were lost, ran away, involved in family misunderstandings (for example, two instances where the child was with grandparents), or as the result of hoaxes. Another 23 alerts were issued in cases where police did not know the name of the allegedly abducted child, often as the result of misunderstandings by witnesses who reported an abduction."
On stranger abductions:
"Seventy of the 233 AMBER Alerts issued in 2004 (30%) were actually children taken by strangers or who were unlawfully travelling with adults other than their legal guardians."
Regarding effectiveness:
"Some outside scholars examining the system in depth disagree with the "official" results.[60][61][62] A team led by University of Nevada criminologist Timothy Griffin looked at hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2006 and found that AMBER Alerts actually played little apparent role in the eventual return of abducted children. Furthermore, AMBER Alerts tended to be 'successful' in relatively mundane abductions, such as when the child was taken by a noncustodial parent or other family member. There was little evidence that AMBER Alerts routinely 'saved lives'"
There are further concerns with AA as "crime prevention theater" (much as the TSA is seen as homeland security theater), of the "crying wolf" effect, over 4 a.m. cell-phone alerts, over use where the Alert criteria aren't met, of distraction effects of highway signage especially during rush hour, and more.
Contrasting AA with a widespread and imminent natural disaster or civil emergency alert:
In the case of an Amber Alert, a very small number of individuals are likely to be in a position to assist at all, let alone actually assist, in a recovery. Risking "alert fatigue" should be a very real concern. I am not opposed to forms of widespread message propagation, but these should be done through nonemergency channels (e.g., a news or other scheduled statement or alert), rather than by distracting drivers, waking sleeping people, or interrupting people engaged in other activities, the vast majority of whom have no bearing on the outcome of the incident.
In the case of an earthquake, tornado warning, tsunami alert, flash flood, landslide, wildfire, or similar event, people over a widespread area have seconds or minutes to act and take measures which will directly and materially benefit them by saving lives, preventing or reducing injury, and reducing harm or damage to property.
These are totally different situations.
If this kind of usage of the alerting system causes people to ignore alerts in the middle of the night, and then an earthquake happens, then the system is counter-effective. Based solely on the situation as laid out in the article, the people deciding on using the system in this case should be strongly reprimanded for squandering trust like that.
If using the system in such cases is actually desirable, a lower tier of alerts that doesn't make more noise than a regular text message should be introduced. It's not like someone sound asleep at 1am is going to go searching for a Suburban just because they were woken up. Indeed, the car was only found by someone going about their regular business in the morning.
Also, the system can't really be said to have saved one life in this case - it probably contributed to reuniting the child with its parent quicker, but there's no evidence suggested in the article that the kid would have died if not for the alerting system.
[1] http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/07/17/early-morning-amber-a...
Verizon, Atlanta
This is HN, right? Come on folks. If I can send packs transcontinental and back in 100ms, then you can get a message out to the people of CA in under 10s. This is not a moon shot project. Our entire telecomm infrastructure operates in ms increments, not 10s increments.
Now, if only the SF startups could work on something useful like this, rather than yet another cat video app. You could even show ads for home repair companies and insurance adjusters during the warning/quake.
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
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.
Apps already have access to the data [http://quakeapp.com/].
Also: operators of heavy or dangerous machinery, surgeons, construction workers...
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."
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.
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.
Hell, maybe this is even a use for "Yo".
> 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]
All that would then be required is that cell phones, pads and computers give some sort of non-mistakeable warning sound upon receiving these packets.
In the US they also do it for AMBER alerts[1]. iPhone has this, not sure about Android though.
[0]: http://9to5mac.com/2011/08/21/ios-5-includes-early-earthquak... [1]: http://www.imore.com/amber-alerts-your-iphone-what-they-are-...
That page can use some improvement, as it says:
"It is mandatory for 3G cellular phones that were put on the market after 2007 to receive this service, though overseas manufacturers (Nokia, Apple, HTC, LG, Samsung, etc.) are not supported"
So, is it mandatory, or only for phones made in Japan?
For example, elevators in areas prone to earthquakes have sensors installed that can detect the movement of the building [1]. If it sways too far it will automatically move the elevator (up or down) to get the car as far as possible from the heavy heavy counterweight - as there is the possibility that it could break free and smush the car.
[1]Elevator Hacking: From the Pit to the Penthouse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzrJjdZDRQ
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
From the 50's to the 80's there was a significant amount of defense funding (mostly DARPA) for seismic monitoring to detect, locate, and analyze nuclear detonations in addition to civilian research purposes. After the cold war ended, the majority of the military funding went away.
Also, on a side note, for those of you looking at the hardware description and thinking "all that exists", notice the sample rate and power requirements. (Don't forget data transmission and/or storage, either.) It's already possible to get dirt cheap sensors. (For some purposes (e.g. surface waves), off-the-shelf accelerometers are good enough, and even traditional oil industry geophones are fairly cheap.) (Obviously broadband stations are a completely different story...) The problem is sample rate and power draw.
Basically, nothing is really a hard limit. Seismologists push the data to its limits, so depending on the purpose you _really_ do need a broadband station. For other purposes, though, you could definitely get away with off-the-shelf accelerometers. We'll take whatever we can get. The more precision the better, but the more sensors you have, the less the precision matters.
As far as whether or not you really need 20 bits of resolution over the full frequency spectrum, you certainly don't for every application. For some applications, though, you need it over most of the frequency spectrum. For others (e.g. strong ground motion) you don't at all. (For a quick overview, see here: http://www.passcal.nmt.edu/content/instrumentation/sensors In most cases, the high frequency component isn't the problem on the sensor side, it's maintaining accuracy on the low-frequency component. High frequency sampling generates more data and results in more power consumption, though, so there's a different set of challenges there.)
The power limits depend on where the station is installed. Typically, they're solar powered with lead-acid batteries (or maybe something else these days) to store energy. Solar panels are expensive and fragile. The less power it needs, the easier it is to reliably deploy.
Overall, if the data is available, someone will push it to its limits. You have to make compromises, and which ones to make depends on exactly what you're trying to do. A ton of cheap, easily deployable instruments changes things. There's a lot of talk about things like this, but it has been hard to do in practice so far.
Take anything I say with a grain of salt, though. I'm an exploration seismologist who crosses paths with earthquake seismologists. I don't really know what I'm talking about.
At any rate, this is all largely a non-answer. I think a lot of this is more within-reach than I realize.
That's another way of earthquake advance warning - taking advantage of the latency between the epicenter and the surrounding area.
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)
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.
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.
I woke up, but in SF it wasn't much of a big deal.
About prediction research, so far there are too few ways to gather relevant data for processes deep within the earth, and too little theoretical knowledge. This should be an attractive field for someone with enough physical and scientific training and a willingness to do difficult research.
[edit] tough crowd...
Relatedly: http://www.earthquakeyo.com/
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).
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").
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.)