Unlike a tsunami or flooding in which there is plenty of time to prepare for a potential disaster, he didn’t think an earthquake warning system could provide enough advance notice. Jay Parrish, the city manager of Ferndale, said he wasn’t aware of anyone getting the alert. “It might have taken longer for the shaking to wake me up if the phone hadn’t also been making a lot of noise,” she said. Worried about her dog, who was asleep in a crate, she quickly got up and headed for the back door, to either stand in for shelter or to head outside if the house began to collapse. She’s not sure which woke her up first, but she said the loud noise and bright light from her phone probably helped her realize the severity of the quake. Jen Olson, who lives in Arcata about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from the epicenter, said she was awoken by shaking and her phone going off at the same time. Because of how the system works, those closest to the center of the earthquake may not have received an alert until they felt shaking, de Groot said.

Some people received the alert with 10 seconds' notice. That process, from seismometer detection to an alert being sent, is all automated, said Robert de Groot, a scientist with the ShakeAlert operations team. That information can then be processed to determine the earthquake's location and magnitude. But the new technology, which operates in California, Oregon and Washington, is not without its challenges.īefore alerts get sent to people’s phones, multiple seismometers have to detect movement below Earth’s surface. It's one of a handful of earthquake warning systems created in different parts of the world over the past few decades, including Japan and Mexico. ShakeAlert was developed by university researchers and is operated by the U.S. “It's really a groundbreaking, first-in-the-nation tool that hopefully saves lives,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services. It was the biggest one the ShakeAlert early warning system has alerted for, since launching publicly in California three years ago.

The quake was centered near the small town of Ferndale, about 210 miles (345 kilometers) northwest of San Francisco. You could see everything moving and shaking.” “I could see breakers and wires in the distance flashing like lightning might look like. “They were all wobbling, flashing on and off,” Eller said.

California earth quake alarm