The Earthquake Closet: Making Early-Warning Useful

Natural Hazards, 2012

Early-warning of imminently approaching strong shaking that could have fatal consequences is a research field that has made great progress. However, its potential to save lives has a serious Achilles heel: The time for getting to safety is 5 to 10 s only, in those cities that need warnings most. Occupants of the upper floors cannot get out of their buildings and narrow streets are not a safe place in strong earthquakes. The official advice, to crawl under a table, protects from falling objects only, but not from collapsing buildings. Thus, only about 10 % of a city's population can benefit from early-warnings, unless they have access to an earthquake protection unit that is strong enough to improve their chances of survival and not being injured by factors of 1,000 to 30,000. The purpose of this paper is to generate discussion on how to use early-warning to improve the safety for occupants of buildings exposed to strong earthquake shaking.

GEOPHYSICS

Earthquake early warning systems (EEW) are becoming increasingly available or in development throughout the world. With public alerting in Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, and parts of the United States, it is important to provide evidence-based recommendations for protective action so people can protect themselves when they receive an alert. Best-practice warning communication research suggests that providing a protective action will increase the efficacy of the message. However, given the diversity of earthquakes and building types, as well as social and cultural contexts where these systems exist, the question is: what is the best protective action to recommend? The answer lies in maximizing life-saving protective actions during an earthquake event requires both contextually relevant messaging and widespread public education about appropriate protective actions under a range of conditions. By researching previous earthquake injury literature, examining current best practices and public edu...

Open-File Report, 2018

Cover images: Photographs showing potential beneficiaries of ShakeAlert, the earthquake early warning system for the West Coast of the United States. Clockwise from the upper left: ShakeAlert may provide enough warning (top left) to slow or stop taxiing planes (photograph from Ersin Ergin/ Shutterstock.com), (top middle) for surgeons or other medical professionals to stop delicate procedures (photograph from Andrei_R./Shutterstock. com), and (top right) for water companies to close valves and preserve precious water reserves (photograph from cpaulfell/Shutterstock.com). In addition, ShakeAlert may provide enough warning for (bottom left) people to drop, cover, and hold on (photograph from ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock. com); (bottom middle) first responders to open bay doors in advance of the shaking (photograph from Seattle Fire Department); and (bottom right) train operators to slow or stop trains (photograph from James Kirkikus/Shutterstock.com).

International Journal of Civil Engineering, 2006

The objective of this paper is to present a new method for protecting the lives of residents in catastrophic earthquake failures of unreinforced masonry buildings by introducing some safe rooms within the buildings. The main idea is that occupants can seek refuge within the safe rooms as soon as the earthquake ground motions are felt. The information obtained from the historical ground motions happened in seismic zones around the globe expresses the lack of enough safety of masonry buildings against earthquake. For this potentially important reason, an attempt has been made to create some cost-effective seismic-resistant areas in some parts of the existing masonry buildings, which are called safe rooms. The practical method for creating these areas and increasing the occupant safety of the buildings is to install some prefabricated steel frames in some of their rooms or in their halls. These frames do not carry any service loads before earthquake. However, if a near field seismic event happens and the load bearing walls of the building destroy, some parts of its floors, which are in the safe areas, will fall on the roof of the installed frames; consequently, the occupants who have sheltered in the safe rooms will survive. This paper expresses the experimental and theoretical work executed on the steel structures of the safe rooms for bearing the shock and impact loads. Finally, it was concluded that both the strength and displacement capacity of the steel frames were adequate to accommodate the distortions generated by seismic loads and aftershocks properly.

Natural Hazards, 2001

Despite their short warning times (seconds to tens of seconds) earthquake early warning systems can become useful tools in risk mitigation provided their design is robust and utilizes the regional tectonics. Bucharest can serve as a good example for such a system with a warning time of 25 seconds. Integration of early warning into real-time information systems turns out to be crucial in disaster management.

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, 2022

In the aftermath of a seismic event, decision-makers have to decide quickly among alternative management actions with limited knowledge on the actual health condition of buildings. Each choice entails different direct and indirect consequences. For example, if a building sustains low damage in the mainshock but people are not evacuated, casualties may occur if aftershocks lead the structure to fail. On the other hand, the evacuation of a structurally sound building could lead to unnecessary financial losses due to business and occupancy interruption. A monitoring system can provide information about the condition of the building after an earthquake that can support the choice between several competing alternatives, targeting the minimization of consequences. This paper proposes a framework for quantifying the benefit of installing a permanent seismic structural health monitoring (S2HM) system to support building evacuation operations after a seismic event. Decision-makers can use th...

—Seismic activity poses a great risk to densely populated modern urban centers. Technical advancements in seismic sensors, telecommunication equipment and personal connectivity provide fundamental components for an earthquake early warning system. Life threating effects of a high magnitude earthquake can be largely reduced by providing an early warning of few seconds to few minutes before arrival of devastating seismic waves. This paper reviews some of the recently deployed earthquake early warning systems. In particular, currently deployed systems and their effectiveness are identified.

IEEE Spectrum, 2000

Earthquakes and Early detection for Minimizing the hazards , 2025

Earthquakes are disastrous to mankind. It affects human life, buildings and economy. Overcoming the after effects of earthquakes & diseases all imposes challenges to human life. All these can be minimised if early detection & warning of an earthquake is sent to areas where possibility of occurrence of earthquake is most predominant.

Frontiers in Earth Science, 2020

Every year, natural hazards affect millions of people around the world, causing significant economic and life losses. The rapid progress of technology and advances in understanding of the highly complex physical phenomena related to various natural hazards have promoted the development of new disaster-mitigation tools, such as earthquake early warning (EEW) systems. However, there is a general lack of integration between the multi-and crossdisciplinary elements of EEW, limiting its effectiveness and applications for end users. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art in EEW, exploring both the technical components (i.e., seismological and engineering) as well as the socio-organizational components (i.e., social science, policy, and management) of EEW systems. This includes a discussion of specific evidence from case studies of Italy, United States' West Coast, Japan, and Mexico, where EEW systems have reached varying levels of maturity. Our aim is to highlight necessary improvements for increasing the effectiveness of the technical aspects of EEW in terms of their implications on operational, political/legal, social, behavioral, and organizational drivers. Our analysis suggests open areas for research, associated with: 1) the information that needs to be included in EEW alerts to implement successful mitigation actions at both individual and organizational levels; 2) the need for response training to the community by official bodies, such as civil protection; 3) existing gaps in the attribution of accountability and development of liability policies involving EEW implementation; 4) the potential for EEW to increase seismic resilience of critical infrastructure and lifelines; 5) the need for strong organizational links with first responders and official EEW bodies; and 6) the lack of engineering-related (i.e., risk and resilience) metrics currently used to support decision making related to the triggering of alerts by various end users.