30 Second Earthquake Warnings

Bill Kendrick writes "A new network of seismic stations may help give as much as a 30 second warning before a major earthquake, giving time to shut down gas lines, stop public transit, etc. Yahoo! News has the story." There are lots of qualifiers in here ("as much as," "some earthquakes") but any warning is probably better than none.

Comments

What could you do with 30 seconds?

[Spamalamadingdong]

It might take 30 seconds to leave your house, but it takes a lot less than that to go stand in a doorway. A list off the top of my head:

• Electronic-ignition gas appliances could shut themselves off until the "all clear" sounded.
• Trains, buses and other public transit could come to a halt before the rails or roadway ruptured.
• Traffic signals could go 4-way red for half a minute.
• Electrical systems could prepare for shutdown to prevent fires and other damage from short circuits (kill the circuit breakers at the first heavy shaking), and hospitals and the like could automatically start their emergency generators to prepare for cutover.

None of these things would have large costs from false alarms, but might prevent a lot of death and destruction if a real tremblor hit. Just being able to shut down the electrical grid would prevent transformers from being damaged by shorts and make it much easier to bring the system back up, and killing most open flames from water heaters and furnaces would prevent a lot of fires. This has real potential.