Getting A Jump On The Next Big One

The U.S. finally has an earthquake alert system to buy the West Coast precious seconds. Now it needs faster delivery

- Adam Popescu

This summer showed not only the promise of the patchwork of earthquake early warning systems popping up on America’s West Coast, but also the challenges it faces. On Aug. 28, when a minor quake briefly rumbled the Los Angeles suburb of La Verne, hundreds of area residents got advance notice from an app on their phones. Farther from the quake, Angelenos got as many as 10 seconds to brace themselves. Less than a mile from the epicenter, David Loor, who lives in La Verne, got two. “Not much,” he says. “But I still saw the alert before I felt the shaking.”

That rumble was no Northridge—the magnitude 6.7 quake that killed 57 people, injured more than 9,000, and dealt the area more than $20 billion in property damage in 1994. But the U.S. Geological Survey says there’s a 99.7 percent chance of a 6.7 or higher quake hitting somewhere on the Pacific coast before someone taking out a 30-year mortgage today has paid it off. In partnership with universities in California, Oregon, and Washington, the USGS has spent 12 years working on Shake Alert, a network of 860 seismometers that will feed an early warning system comparable to those in other tectonically challenged locales.