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

Lawsuit Potential

[Unknown Poltroon]

What happens when these things are shut off and the quake dosent happen? Or when they dont work? You KNOW some idiot will sue eiter way. Also, what about false alarms? How long before people start ignoring this? Hey, dont get me wrong, i think its fantastic and should be put into use immediately, but these days......

Statistics. Security.

[Nyarly]

Ultimately, though, for this to be useful, it would have to be automated from end-to-end. Thirty seconds isn't enough to double check the system, and introducing humans into the mix just adds error. But the automated system has problems:

First, "near 100 percent accuracy" isn't 100% accuracy. There's no information here about false positives, but my guess is that, like many testing and alarm problems, tuning out one way, opens up the other side disproportionately. So you'll always have issues where the gas mains don't cut off in time, but people'll understand. But when the gas cuts out from too many false positives, people'll call for the whole thing to be turned off.

The other side of this is: I hope it's not supposed to be wired to the Internet. How's that for a script kiddie prank. "1 4m 2 733t 4 j00! 1 0wn3d CA! h4h4h4h4h!" Punks. Still, even with a large private network, being able to fake an earthquake isn't a small thing.