The United States will soon have its own earthquake early warning system, thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and its partners, Slate reports.
USGS developed the warning system, called "ShakeAlert," with university, state and private-sector partners, and first unveiled the app on the West Coast last April. It uses almost 860 seismometers located throughout California, Oregon and Washington to detect earthquakes as they happen.
According to USGS staff scientist Robert-Michael de Groot, ShakeAlert is split into two sections: the scientific section that analyses the data, and a distribution network to send that information to various federal and private partners. Institutions such as schools, hospitals, utilities and transportation services would then get a warning in the event of an earthquake.
De Groot added that warning individuals is much more problematic, but that ShakeAlert has partnered with technology firm Early Warning Labs to produce a smartphone application called "QuakeAlert," which is due to be released this summer. It’s currently in beta testing, and some early users were able to report their first experience with the app when a quake hit off the coast of Los Angeles on April 5.
"There’s a lot of inherent problems with mobile alerting," said Early Warning Lab’s Joshua Bashioum, "bottlenecks with personal notifications, people moving and not changing their location settings, or not having location services on," leading many to miss or not receive the notification sent by QuakeAlert.
"The really big challenge at this point is the delivery of those messages once they’re generated," de Groot said. "There is currently no technology that we have through any delivery method that will get the alerts to us at the rate that we want them to get to us."
USGS obtained an additional $22.9 million in government funding last month, which they hope will allow them to double its network of seismometers by next year.
We are working as quickly as we can on this," de Groot said. "For me, it would be a big letdown if the big earthquake happened and our system wasn’t completely built out. It’s a race against time, but we don’t want to race so quickly that we make mistakes along the way."
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