Earthquake early warning system
Countries such as Mexico,[8] United States[9] and Canada[10] have regional earthquake warning systems and notify people using the same technologies mentioned earlier.
Countries such as Guatemala,[11] El Salvador,[12] Nicaragua,[13] Costa Rica[14] and Romania[15] have deployed systems that alert only specific users through the download of applications.
While many of these efforts are governmental, several private companies also manufacture earthquake early warning systems to protect infrastructure such as elevators, gas lines and fire stations.
It was placed to protect a piece of critical transportation infrastructure called the George Massey Tunnel, which connects the north and south banks of the Fraser River.
[17] The success and the reliability of the system was such that as of 2015 there have been several additional installations on the west coast of Canada and the United States, and there are more being planned.
On August 29, 2024, the Canadian Earthquake Early Warning system was launched in British Columbia by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), and is expected to be expanded to southern Quebec and eastern Ontario later in 2024.
Large amounts of monitoring stations, sensors, and analytic systems were installed to improve the accuracy, responsiveness, and comprehensiveness of the earthquake data.
In June 2019, the Chengdu Hi-Tech Disaster Reduction Institution, part of the national EEWS system, successfully warned various townships of a 6.0M earthquake 10–27 seconds before the shockwave arrived.
[25][26] It was modeled partly on the Urgent Earthquake Detection and Alarm System (UrEDAS [ja]) of Japan Railways, which was designed to enable automatic braking of bullet trains.
People living at a further distance from the epicenter and the detection point may be alerted before they are reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.
The app uses accelerometers in phones that are stationary and connected to a power supply to record shaking and relay that information back to the laboratory.
[44] Google's alerts were extended to Turkey, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in June 2021.
[45] In September 2024, Google announced their warnings would now cover the entire United States (including areas not monitored by USGS's ShakeAlert); at the time, the earthquake alerts could be delivered to 97 other countries.
[48] The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has investigated collaboration with the social networking site Twitter to allow for more rapid construction of ShakeMaps.
