How You Could Get an Early Warning for the Next Big Quake
0How You Could Get an Early Warning for the Next Big Quake.
At 2:39 am Thursday morning, millions of Bay Area residents from Sacramento to San Jose were shaken awake by the rolling tremble of a 4.4 magnitude earthquake. The eight-mile deep tremor struck along the Hayward fault, two miles southeast of Berkeley. From my apartment just 20 blocks from the epicenter, I woke with the rest of the neighborhood and rode out the wake from bed for about 10 seconds.
But four lucky people in the Bay Area got a head start, receiving warning notifications before the shaking even started.
Using a free app called QuakeAlert, two beta-testers who work at the University of California Berkeley received notifications—though only two and five seconds before feeling the quake. Two others, up near Sacramento but close enough to register intensities over 2.0, received texts a full 27 seconds before any noticeable tremors.
Developed by Santa Monica-based Early Warning Labs, QuakeAlert is one of the few ways Americans can get advance notice of an impending quake. While nations like Japan and Mexico already have early warning systems that send texts and siren blares out to citizens ahead of an impending quake, the US is still stuck in beta mode.