It will only report quakes that are already over. News reports, online reporting "Did You Feel It?" pages, etc already do a pretty good job of telling seismologists that something just happened.
Valuable earthquake detection would be detecting the P-Wave from a quake in progress, and automatically broadcasting a SAME Code [wikipedia.org], combined with some kind of equivilent forcibly pushed to every cell phone connected to a tower. Japan has something like this already. [engadget.com] California is kinda, sorta working on it, but I'm pretty sure it's grossly underfunded and not really a priority.
Earthquake models suggest a quake on the northern or southern reaches of the San Andreas fault would reach Los Angeles in about 40 seconds. That's actually a huge chunk of time.
Let's assume:
- 20 seconds to detect a quake / automatically crosscheck with multiple sensors and transmit a warning to a predefined area.
- 5 to 10 seconds for devices to receive, decode and go into alert mode. Weather radios are always listening for SAME transmissions and can decode more or less instantly (assuming the user has programmed in their location). Cell networks could probably get the data there in the time it takes for a regular text message to arrive.
- That gives you 10 to 15 seconds to pull your car over, stop doing delicate surgery, stop fixing your roof, etc and find something to crawl under. It also gives you time to trigger automated fail safes. Gas valves can be set to close, emergency generators can be spun-up, fire pumps can activate, elevators can go to their recall floors and hold their doors open, while fire station doors can roll-up on their own and lock in place.
tim howard goal ben gibbard nfl playoff schedule tim howard scores nick cannon kidney failure consumer financial protection bureau casey anthony video
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.