A system that gives people advance warning of earthquakes in Washington, Oregon and California is one step closer to being accessible to Alaskans.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A system that gives people advance warning of earthquakes in Washington, Oregon and California is one step closer to being accessible to Alaskans. At least $2 million of the $34.9 million allocated by Congress to the U.
S. Geological Survey for continued development of ShakeAlert, America’s earthquake early warning system, will be used for adding Alaska to the system. The Alaska Earthquake Center will be working with the USGS on implementation. Michael West, Alaska Earthquake Center state seismologist, said many earthquake-prone parts of the world, including sections of the United States, have implemented early warning systems. “ShakeAlert is the primary implementation in the United States to achieve the goals of earthquake early warning,” West said. “The west coast of the United States, California, Oregon, Washington have done this now successfully for many years and are operational today, so it feels past time for Alaska to join the ranks of these places and have early warning capabilities.” Once in place, the ShakeAlert early warning system’s amount of time it can warn people of an earthquake before the shaking starts can range from a few seconds to upwards of over a minute. West said one thing that makes it hard to predict how much warning people will have is that Alaska has many different types of earthquakes. “We have earthquakes that happen on faults inside of Alaska, on the mainland, in the Anchorage area, all around the Interior, down in southeast,” he said. “We have earthquakes that occur 50, 100, 200 kilometers beneath the surface ... A third kind we have is these gigantic, 1964-style magnitude 8, magnitude 9 earthquakes that occur off the coast. These are all very different scenarios for early warning. “The closest parallel for Alaska would be Japan. Japan has had a very active warning system for many, many years now, and it was in place during, people may remember, the magnitude 9 earthquake about 15 years ago ... People who were in Tokyo for that event had a solid 60–90 seconds of warning before the shaking hit.” With the extra time to prepare before the shaking, people at home can drop, cover and hold, as they’re often recommended, he said. However, people who are working can also use the extra time to protect themselves and others around them as well. “I think some of the bigger opportunities are things we don’t think about so much ... simple things like turning all the stoplights to red, shutting off the off-ramps two bridges, slowing trains, moving people out of landslide or avalanche-prone areas,” West said. “In places like hospitals, it can be a chance to move to generator power in advance of an outage. “In our military sector, there’s all sorts of kinds of activities that can happen, as simple as pausing the take off and landing of planes. Just pause, a minute or two, ‘Why don’t you do one more lap before landing?’ To a whole lot of more sensitive kinds of actions you can take.” West said the implementation plan crafted by the state and the USGS makes a conservative estimate that full implementation of the system may take about half-a-dozen years. However, partway through that period, early warning alerts may be active in certain areas, likely in southcentral. “There is an instrumentation component of this, making sure we are instrumenting and monitoring the ground and all the places where earthquakes come from,” he said. “There’s obviously a very significant IT component, the software and data transmission and getting messages out and all of these things, and then there’s an educational component, because we as Alaskans need to understand how to use that information. All of that’s gonna take time. “We are at the beginning. This has been many years in the works. It will take some years to deliver on, but it feels high time to kind of join the ranks of other places. People who live in certain parts of the west coast, this is already just something they expect in life. They have been accustomed for years to knowing about shaking before it starts. It’s a little bit more of a new concept for us.” ‘Every fiber of me wishes I could change it all’: Veteran musher posts tribute to dog who died during IditarodTwo killed in ‘confined space’ aboard tug boat near Ketchikan, Coast Guard reportsWashington man convicted in fentanyl deaths of two Alaska menTwo Alaskans are just two wins away from a national college hoops title
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