For California, an Earthquake Early Warning System Is Up and Running

autospa writes "In California's Coachella Valley around Palm Springs, a state-of-the-art, first-in-the-world earthquake early warning system in now installed and operational. Twelve locations are now in place with 120 sites planned, all meant to detect an earthquake and give people a chance to get under a table, or in the case of a fire station, get the engines outside of the building."

Re:Interesting idea, horrible article

[drerwk]

Without reading the article, it is a computer which then calls the fire department garage doors and they open. The FD will not collapse on the Engines but the door may jam, or not work for lack of electricity. Also some elevators may stop and open at the nearest floor. hospital generators may start. That sort of thing. I am not expecting a text that say duck. I was in Santa Cruz eating dinner for the '89 and it was terrifying. Even though the fire engines got out, the roads were choked and they could not get anywhere. After about 15 minutes, I could count about 6 fires in the distance. I had even heard it might give warning in surgery to pull out instruments and cover the patient to keep dust out.

Re:Interesting idea, horrible article

[ColdWetDog]

I think you're correct (I read TFA, as usual it doesn't help).

The big question will be the false positive rate. If you're randomly opening up doors / turning on large, expensive generators and scrambling OR teams on a regular basis, it will get shut off like all of the OTHER alarm systems that cry wolf repeatedly. Presumably, this bit of wisdom has been considered by the engineering team and it's acceptable (if not dozens of Slashdot posts will helpfully remind them). Be nice to have more details.