Experts believe the growing death toll from Thursday’s 8.1-magnitude quake off Mexico’s southern coast could have been worse if alarms had not gone off throughout faraway population centers well before the shaking started.
The temblor, which struck just before midnight, knocked down buildings and caused skyscrapers to sway hundreds of miles away in Mexico City, but television newscasters, businesses and utility companies there got as much as 92 seconds to warn people and take other steps to protect them.
Japan and Taiwan have made use of the same kind of system, but earthquake-prone California is still trying to develop one, even as geologists warn that the risk of a seismic disaster looms along faults up and down the coast, including the San Andreas and Hayward faults.
Some experts on Friday posed a question: Why does Mexico have an early warning system while the richest country in the world does not? They warned that the U.S. may learn the hard way the cost of being slow to adopt the technology, which could send an alert to key agencies — or every smartphone — up to a minute before the shaking begins.
“The simple answer is inadequate funding,” said Doug Given, the earthquake early warning coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena. “We haven’t had the killer earthquake to create the political will to do it.”
The USGS developed one of the world’s most sophisticated early warning systems in 2012, and in April of this year it set up a dozen pilot projects allowing testing by emergency management groups, police departments, fire agencies and companies in California, Oregon and Washington.
The system relies on a phenomenon in which an earthquake sends several types of seismic waves coursing through the Earth for thousands of miles at various speeds. The waves that cause the dangerous ground shaking that can destroy buildings and take lives move slower than data does between modern communication devices.
The program, called ShakeAlert, sends signals that could, in addition to giving people 10 seconds or more to duck under heavy desks, trigger firehouse doors to open, gas valves and oil production lines to close, elevators to halt at the nearest floor, and even amusement park rides to stop.
BART, which could brake trains, is among the agencies that are now receiving earthquake alerts from the more than 200 stations of the California Integrated Seismic Network. The prototype includes 740 of the 1,675 seismic stations needed to complete the system and provide adequate coverage for California, Oregon and Washington, but the political commitment to finish the job has been lacking.
President Trump’s budget proposal this year would have ended the program, but 28 California legislators successfully protested, including leaders from both parties, and it appears the system will get another $10.2 million next year, Given said. The problem, he said, is that operators are still well short of the $38 million needed to build the system, and they’ve secured none of the $16 million a year they need to maintain it.
“It’s moved forward and is more reliable than it was in 2012,” said Given, who pointed out that California’s warning system would be superior to the one in Mexico, which detects earthquakes in the subduction zone off the coast. “Our intent is to build a system that can be very fast and very accurate so that with a local quake near to you, you will still get some warning.”
The Mexican system may not be as sophisticated, but, except for a recent false alarm, it generally works. Anne Sorensen, a Danish journalist living in Mexico City, said she was jolted out of a sound sleep by a siren. Though she didn’t get up until the shaking started, her roommate and many others took action.
“My furniture started to fall over, the mirror fell down, a lamp got crushed and my bed was moving,” said Sorensen. “I tried to get out of bed because I could hear my roommate, who was very scared, and I fell flat on the floor. I got up and made it out to the doorway, and that’s where my roommate was standing.”
Sorensen admitted that the alarm would not have helped if the building had come down, but she said it was clearly better than being caught by surprise.
Jennifer Strauss, the regional coordinator for the ShakeAlert project, who also works at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, said about half of the nonfatal injuries in the deadly 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles were “due to things falling, things beaning people on the head.”
“If somebody can drop, cover and hold on under a sturdy table or get away from a huge window,” she said, they might save their life. “These are things that you can do in seconds, and things that a warning system could help (enable).”
Given said Mexico built its system in response to an earthquake that devastated the capital in 1985, killing an estimated 10,000 people. Japan’s system, which is similar, was a response to the Kobe earthquake, which left 6,400 dead. Taiwan built an alert system after the Chi Chi earthquake in 1999 killed 2,400, and China is building one in response to the 2008 Wenchuan quake that killed 87,000.
“We’re hoping in the United States that we will build our system before a devastating earthquake instead of afterward,” Given said.
Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite
———
©2017 the San Francisco Chronicle
Visit the San Francisco Chronicle at www.sfgate.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
