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FILE – A mobile phone customer looks at an earthquake warning application on an iPhone in Los Angeles on Jan. 3, 2019. Seconds before a magnitude 6.4 earthquake jolted the Northern California coast, an alert sent by phone warned 3 million people to “Drop, cover, hold on.” The event marked the greatest test yet to an earthquake warning system launched three years ago.
FILE – Dr. Lucy Jones, senior advisor for risk reduction for the U.S. Geological Survey, describes how an early warning system would provide advance warning of an earthquake, at a news conference in the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 28, 2014. Seconds before a magnitude 6.4 earthquake jolted the Northern California coast, an alert sent by phone warned 3 million people to “Drop, cover, hold on.” The event marked the greatest test yet to an earthquake warning system launched three years ago.
Celia Magdaleno, 67, collects water from her neighbor’s pool to use for her toilet since water service has yet to resume following an earthquake in Rio Dell, Calif., Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022.
Celia Magdaleno turns on her gas stove to boil water before giving her husband a bath, following an earthquake in Rio Dell, Calif., Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. Magdaleno’s husband is undergoing dialysis treatment and said is crucial for him to be clean before receiving treatment to avoid infections.
Brenda López Alvarado, left, and Celia Magdaleno walk to their homes after collecting water from their neighbor’s pool following an earthquake in Rio Dell, Calif., Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. Water service has not return to the city.
Kenny Ransbottom walks through debris inside his auto parts store after an earthquake in Rio Dell, Calif., Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022. A strong earthquake shook a rural stretch of Northern California early Tuesday, jolting residents awake, cutting off power to 70,000 people, and damaging some buildings and a roadway, officials said.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — 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 was hailed as the biggest test yet of the warning system since its public launch.
But the people most rattled by the magnitude 6.4 earthquake early Tuesday said the alert didn’t give them enough time to take cover as the temblor shook homes off foundations, knocked out power and water to thousands, and injured more than a dozen people.
Jimmy Eller, who was sitting in his parked Chevy Malibu while working as a security guard, said he was already in the throes of the violent quake when he noticed his phone had lit up with the warning. He was more focused on what was going on outside as street lamps began to sway.
“They were all wobbling, flashing on and off,” Eller said. “I could see breakers and wires in the distance flashing like lightning might look like. It was terrifying. You could see everything moving and shaking.”
The quake was centered near the small town of Ferndale, about 210 miles (345 kilometers) northwest of San Francisco. It was the biggest one the ShakeAlert early warning system has alerted for, since launching publicly in California three years ago.
“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.
ShakeAlert was developed by university researchers and is operated by the U.S. Geological Survey. 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. But the new technology, which operates in California, Oregon and Washington, is not without its challenges.
Before alerts get sent to people’s phones, multiple seismometers have to detect movement below Earth’s surface. That information can then be processed to determine the earthquake’s location and magnitude. That process, from seismometer detection to an alert being sent, is all automated, said Robert de Groot, a scientist with the ShakeAlert operations team.
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 (40 kilometers) 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.
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.
“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.
Jay Parrish, the city manager of Ferndale, said he wasn’t aware of anyone getting the alert. 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.
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.”
It’s hard to pinpoint the reason why someone who should have received the alert did not without having more information, de Groot said. Some people may have turned off the notifications from Wireless Emergency Alerts, the same system run by the federal government that sends Amber Alerts to phones.
A glitch in an earthquake warning app for San Diego residents that relies on the system’s data falsely alerted people more than 650 miles (1,040 kilometers) away from the epicenter.
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 (400 kilometers) from the epicenter of Tuesday’s Northern California quake, said Richard Allen, director of the Seismology Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
In a 2021 blog post, the Seismology Lab explained why we don’t know when an earthquake will happen before it starts.
“The physical processes along an earthquake fault before and during a rupture are so complex that seismologists have all but given up on trying to achieve the elusive goal of predicting when a strong quake will happen,” it read.
The lab developed an app called MyShake that notified about 270,000 residents about the temblor.
“From a technical standpoint, I would say the system did a great job,” Allen said.
Allen said the next step is helping people understand the importance of dropping to the ground so that they do it automatically, which could help prevent injuries.
About 140 miles (225 kilometers) from the earthquake’s center, Anna Hogan, a student at California State University, Chico, was talking on the phone with her brother when an alert came through. She took cover. And while she didn’t end up feeling the earthquake, she’s glad she moved to a safer spot.
As someone who’s lived in earthquake-prone areas like Alaska and San Francisco, she knows the toll they can take.
“It scared me, yes,” she said of the alert. “But being able to shelter in place is better than not.”
Associated Press writers Brian Melley in Los Angeles and Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento contributed to this report.
Sophie Austin is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on Twitter: @sophieadanna
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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It could be the end of the red dusty line for NASA’s InSight lander on Mars. The lander has fallen silent after four years of operation.
Forecasters are warning of treacherous holiday travel and life-threatening cold for big parts of the nation, an arctic air mass blows into the already-frigid southern United States. In a special weather statement Sunday, the National Weather Service predicted “extreme and prolonged freezing conditions for southern Mississippi and southeast Louisiana.” The rare arctic air mass comes as an earlier storm system gradually winds down in the northeastern U.S., after burying parts of the region under two feet of snow. Utility companies brought in extra workers from other states but were hampered by slick roads and dangerous conditions.
Polar bears in Canada’s Western Hudson Bay — on the southern edge of the Arctic — are continuing to die in high numbers, a new government survey of the land carnivore has found. Females and bear cubs are having an especially hard time, the study found. Researchers surveyed the region home to the ‘Polar Bear Capital of the World’ by air in 2021 and estimated there were 618 bears, down from the 842 in 2016, when the population was last counted. Frozen salt water, the sea ice that polar bears rely on to go out and hunt seals, continues to disappear.
A major advance in fusion research announced in Washington on Tuesday was decades in coming. Scientists say that for the first time, they’ve been able to engineer a reaction that produced more power than was used to ignite it. The breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California used powerful lasers focusing enormous energy on a tiny capsule filled with fuel. But researchers and outside experts acknowledge it will likely take decades more before fusion might one day be used to produce nearly limitless carbon-free energy.
A species of glass frogs found in South and Central America has the rare ability to turn on and off its transparent appearance. Researchers report Thursday in the journal Science that some sleeping glass frogs concentrate, or “hide,” nearly 90% of their red blood cells in their liver. Because they have transparent skin and other tissues, it’s the blood circulating through their bodies that would otherwise give them away. When the frogs are awake and active, they become opaque. Only a few animals are naturally transparent, mostly ocean dwellers. The trick of turning on transparency while sleeping and vulnerable to predators appears to be unique to the frogs.
The big earthquake that rocked the far north coast of California this week originated in an area under the Pacific Ocean where multiple tectonic plates collide, creating the state’s most seismically active region. The Mendocino Triple Junction is the meeting place of the Gorda, Pacific and North American plates, which are massive moving slabs of Earth’s crust. The Gorda Plate is diving under the North American plate in a process called subduction. Tuesday’s magnitude 6.4 earthquake occurred southwest of the Humboldt County community of Ferndale. The U.S. Geological Survey says analysis indicates it likely occurred within the Gorda Plate.
When it comes to dealing with the consequences of climate change, the best advance can be to retreat. That’s what officials have learned along a Canadian coastline that is particularly vulnerable to erosion. At Forillon National Park and the seaside town of Perce on Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula, civilization has been pulled back from the water’s edge where possible. Defenses erected against the sea ages ago have been dismantled. The idea, says one official, is to “move with the sea, not against it.” The peninsula’s approach is a test case for far-flung places where strategic capitulation to nature is possible, even when human settlements are in the mix.
A day after a historic biodiversity agreement was reached, countries now face pressure to deliver on the promises. The most significant part of the global biodiversity framework approved early Monday is a commitment to protect 30% of land and water considered important for biodiversity by 2030. The deal also calls for raising $200 billion by 2030 for biodiversity from a range of sources and working to phase out or reform subsidies that could provide another $500 billion for nature. Advocates and negotiators said the money, stronger accountability language in the framework and greater awareness should help countries meet these goals.
An arctic blast has brought extreme cold, heavy snow and high winds to much of the U.S. Cold air moving down from Canada has caused temperatures to plunge dramatically. The subsequent “bomb cyclone” has pummeled much of the country with blizzard conditions. The weather system is sweeping across two-thirds of the country and has thrown a wrench in holiday flights and road trips. The weather system started when cold air pooled up in the Arctic, then was pushed down into the U.S. by the jet stream. Things should start to warm up again after Christmas.
FILE – A mobile phone customer looks at an earthquake warning application on an iPhone in Los Angeles on Jan. 3, 2019. Seconds before a magnitude 6.4 earthquake jolted the Northern California coast, an alert sent by phone warned 3 million people to “Drop, cover, hold on.” The event marked the greatest test yet to an earthquake warning system launched three years ago.
FILE – Dr. Lucy Jones, senior advisor for risk reduction for the U.S. Geological Survey, describes how an early warning system would provide advance warning of an earthquake, at a news conference in the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 28, 2014. Seconds before a magnitude 6.4 earthquake jolted the Northern California coast, an alert sent by phone warned 3 million people to “Drop, cover, hold on.” The event marked the greatest test yet to an earthquake warning system launched three years ago.
Celia Magdaleno, 67, collects water from her neighbor’s pool to use for her toilet since water service has yet to resume following an earthquake in Rio Dell, Calif., Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022.
Celia Magdaleno turns on her gas stove to boil water before giving her husband a bath, following an earthquake in Rio Dell, Calif., Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. Magdaleno’s husband is undergoing dialysis treatment and said is crucial for him to be clean before receiving treatment to avoid infections.
Brenda López Alvarado, left, and Celia Magdaleno walk to their homes after collecting water from their neighbor’s pool following an earthquake in Rio Dell, Calif., Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. Water service has not return to the city.
Kenny Ransbottom walks through debris inside his auto parts store after an earthquake in Rio Dell, Calif., Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022. A strong earthquake shook a rural stretch of Northern California early Tuesday, jolting residents awake, cutting off power to 70,000 people, and damaging some buildings and a roadway, officials said.
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