As sensors picked up the first signs of a strong earthquake jolting the Northern California coast, an alert was blasted to 3 million smartphone users telling them to 'drop, cover, hold on.'
“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.
Some people received the alert with 10 seconds’ notice. 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.Jen Olson, who lives in Arcata about 25 miles from the epicenter, said she was awoken by shaking and her phone going off at the same time. 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.
When told that the alarm sounded for some 10 seconds before the violent shaking, he said: “That might have saved one of my glass jars.” This was the first time the system alerted people in two states — both California and Oregon, de Groot said. There’s a study underway to explore alerting in parts of Alaska in the future.Various apps use ShakeAlert’s data to notify people who could experience significant quake effects. People were alerted within a radius of about 250 miles from the epicenter of Tuesday’s Northern California quake, said Richard Allen, director of the Seismology Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
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