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TECHNOLOGY
Bloomberg Businessweek
October 8, 2018
DATA: U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
○ Earthquakes of
magnitude 6.7 or higher
on the West Coast
In California
In Washington
1900
1906
Great San
Francisco
earthquake
1989
World Series
earthquake
1965
Puget Sound
earthquake
2001
Nisqually
earthquake
2018
28
Gettinga JumpOn theNext BigOne
○ The U.S. finally has an earthquake alert system to buy the West Coast precious seconds. Now it needs faster delivery
This summer showed not only the promise of the
patchwork of earthquake early warning systems
popping up on America’s West Coast, but also
the challenges it faces. On Aug. 28, when a minor
quake briely rumbled the Los Angeles suburb of
La Verne, hundreds of area residents got advance
notice from an app on their phones. Farther from
the quake, Angelenos got as many as 10 seconds to
brace themselves. Less than a mile from the epi-
center, David Loor, who lives in La Verne, got two.
“Not much,” he says. “But I still saw the alert before
I felt the shaking.”
That rumble was no Northridge—the magni-
tude 6.7 quake that killed 57 people, injured more
than 9,000, and dealt the area more than $20 billion
in property damage in 1994. But the U.S. Geological
Survey says there’s a 99.7 percent chance of a 6.7 or
higher quake hitting somewhere on the Paciic coast
before someone taking out a 30-year mortgage today
has paid it of. In partnership with universities in
California, Oregon, and Washington, the USGS has
spent 12 years working on ShakeAlert, a network of
860 seismometers that will feed an early warning
system comparable to those in other tectonically
challenged locales.
The feds spent $38 million to build ShakeAlert
and are funding operating expenses of $16 million a
year. The system is slated to go online in the next few
months. In the meantime, the USGS has been rely-
ing on both government agencies and private com-
panies to work out how to give people such as Loor
more than two extra seconds. “If you know a major
quake is coming, you can brace for impact,” says Bob
de Groot, who’s heading ShakeAlert development at
the USGS. “A lot of people won’t die needlessly.”
The idea behind ShakeAlert is simple enough;
Japan and Mexico have employed similar systems
since the 1990s. As soon as ShakeAlert’s seismom-
eters detect a 5.0 or higher, the system determines
the area that will be afected and sends a warn-
ing through the Federal Emergency Management
Agency’s wireless emergency alert system. (It’s sup-
posed to sound a bit like an Amber alert.) ShakeAlert
generates the message to FEMA in ive seconds,
and then FEMA blasts it out in an additional
weekend hikes in the Vancouver area without
looking over his shoulder. The Canadian immi-
gration agency says it’s approved 200 applicants
for permanent residency since February, and
AlMasoud is hoping he’ll be on that list soon, too.
For now, he’s trying to get Flair to a point where
he can apply for approval from American inan-
cial regulators and start showing it of publicly.
Only occasionally, as when he reminisces about
NBA games or his bygone ’67 Pontiac GTO, does
he grow wistful about the opportunities he left
behind. “It had always been my dream to start a
business in the U.S.,” he says. “Because of what
Trump has done, now I have to hire Canadians.”
—Olivia Carville
THE BOTTOM LINE Fast-tracked permanent residency and five-
figure relocation bonuses are among the perks some countries are
o
fering immigrant startup founders as the U.S. shuts them out.
⊳ The aftermath of the
Northridge quake