If the system were relatively reliable, 10 seconds is actually a lot of time. During the day, it's enough time for many people to take cover. During the night, it's enough time to at least get people up and semi-oriented.
The other thing to note is that earthquakes are much shorter than most people think, usually about a minute long. 10 seconds is quite a bit of time compared to that.
I think the point is that 10 seconds of warning really translates to 0-5 seconds of warning given the time it takes to send out the warning (text, radio, emergency broadcast). Then add in time to wake and get oriented.
Unlikely. The Bay Area is an area of "tectonic activity" (as evidenced by Loma Prieta in 1989, and now the the 6.0 from yesterday) - but I"m willing to wager fewer than 1 in a thousand people anchor their fridge to the wall.
Hot water heaters and book cases - Yes. But not fridges. They rarely tip over in earthquakes.
I'm not really afraid of what happens if my fridge tips over, either. I spend very little time in front of the fridge, and never when anything but fully alert. If the room started shaking, I could probably step a little to the left or to the right and be fine. I'm probably more concerned about all the glasses on high shelves, or the knives, etc., in terms of floor hazards after the quake.
The thing which terrifies me is that I'm in a 1971-construction building with a soft story, in a city with a defective police department. My car is parked in that soft story. Assuming the entire building doesn't collapse and kill me, there's nothing above my-standing-height except one projector, which even from projector-height, would be unlikely to kill me. But I'd probably have fallen to my death and been crushed by huge volumes of unreinforced masonry before that.
(Please, please, if there's going to be an earthquake while I'm in the Bay Area, let it happened while I'm in the office, or even better, in a datacenter. The new office is being fully retrofitted right now, so it should be pretty good.)
But there's no way to reliably get information to all people within ten seconds. Even if a text message alert was sent out as soon as the system was triggered, that time, plus the time for even the most phone-ready people to pull out their phone and do the necessary steps to read a message leads to basically no warning at all.
In Japan, all phones (even the iPhone) are setup to emit a loud alarm sound when an earthquake warning is sent, whether your phone is on manner mode or not. The alarm sound is very distinctive and the same for all phones as well as all TV channels.
Right when the guy in that last video said 'sugoi' is about when I said 'oh shit' and crawled under my desk. The amazing thing is that I sat at my desk for about 30 seconds beforehand wondering when this 'rather large' earthquake was going to start to slow down rather than escalate.
After feeling a lot of them, you start to be able to guess their distance and severity based on the P-wave vs S-wave timing of what you feel. It's kind of like counting seconds after seeing lighting until you hear thunder except you have 2 components:
Here's a matrix of the 6 big TV channels. Top left is the national broadcast (of the public broadcaster, NHK), the others are local commercial Tokyo broadcasts. The earthquake was initially not estimated to be big enough to affect Tokyo so Tokyo stations didn't automatically broadcast the initial alert. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOrAwvJLKxo
It says something about Japan that the sound is kind of sweet. In the US, we have the Amber Alert sound specially hand-crafted to make you think the world is ending.
In the US, amber alerts hijack phones and emit an alarm. Had it happen in the middle of a college lecture.. although some phones received it 5 minutes later than others. I'm guessing this functionality could be used for earthquakes.
I've got to say that my experience with Amber Alerts is strongly negative.
For a while they were triggering various alerts (including EBS interruptions on radio and TV), with a frequency that lead me to strongly discount such warnings.
Emergencies should be reserved for circumstances in which the recipient of a message can and should take immediate action. An alert is just that: an advisory. Run these was an item in normal newscasts, or in advisory systems (including if you absolutely must, highway signage). But not distracting people.
The fact that, at least in my recollection, a huge number of Amber Alerts appear to involve immediate family / partner situations (boyfriend/girlfriend, other parent, husband/wife, modulo estrangement). Most seem to resolve reasonably well. And I'm not sure that a full-on aggressive response benefits the situation. Again, that's a recollection and personal perception. But overall, I'm underimpressed by the system.
This seems to have improved somewhat in more recent years.
And yet, at least once, the alert on the phone specifically (rather than a newscast or highway signage) appears to have saved at least one life[0]. Of course, we don't know what would have happened, and it did wake up the whole state, too. But I think the argument in favor is that the probability of success for these searches decreases quickly with time, so there is substantial value in getting word out quickly.
The argument isn't whether the alert alerts, but whether over-usage conditions people to ignore the alert.
If this kind of usage of the alerting system causes people to ignore alerts in the middle of the night, and then an earthquake happens, then the system is counter-effective. Based solely on the situation as laid out in the article, the people deciding on using the system in this case should be strongly reprimanded for squandering trust like that.
If using the system in such cases is actually desirable, a lower tier of alerts that doesn't make more noise than a regular text message should be introduced. It's not like someone sound asleep at 1am is going to go searching for a Suburban just because they were woken up. Indeed, the car was only found by someone going about their regular business in the morning.
Also, the system can't really be said to have saved one life in this case - it probably contributed to reuniting the child with its parent quicker, but there's no evidence suggested in the article that the kid would have died if not for the alerting system.
There's a discussion on reddit at the moment concerning cycling, where one of the interesting assertions of recent research is that overall public health would benefit from no helmet laws and more bike lanes.
That is: adults are less likely to ride bikes if they're required to wear a helmet (as I understand, laws for minors would remain), but the health benefits of increased activity and cycling outweigh the risks of injury.
I'm open to arguments over flawed methodology or other issues, but the point is that sometimes there are apparent safety measures that, when taken, increase risks. Another case in point would be TSA airport security measures, which by encouraging more trips to be made by automobile, have arguably increased overall death risks to travelers (as reported by Bruce Schneier and others). I'm among those who've either foregone or elected to drive on journeys rather than fly, even aware of the risks (and, frankly, if you've got the time, it's often far more interesting and enjoyable).
The US Department of Justice reports 685 successful recoveries, though it doesn't list the number of activations of the Amber Alert system, nor whether or not the recoveries were materially aided by the system.
According to that, there had been 190 activations (fewer than I'd thought), 77 were parental abductions (about 35%), acquaintances 55, strangers, 37. Another 355 alert requests were made but not activated.
The Wikipedia article on the Amber Alert system raises a number of the points I've mentioned above:
"A Scripps Howard study of the 233 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States in 2004 found that most issued alerts did not meet the Department of Justice's criteria. Fully 50% (117 alerts) were categorized by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as being "family abductions", very often a parent involved in a custody dispute. There were 48 alerts for children who had not been abducted at all, but were lost, ran away, involved in family misunderstandings (for example, two instances where the child was with grandparents), or as the result of hoaxes. Another 23 alerts were issued in cases where police did not know the name of the allegedly abducted child, often as the result of misunderstandings by witnesses who reported an abduction."
On stranger abductions:
"Seventy of the 233 AMBER Alerts issued in 2004 (30%) were actually children taken by strangers or who were unlawfully travelling with adults other than their legal guardians."
Regarding effectiveness:
"Some outside scholars examining the system in depth disagree with the "official" results.[60][61][62] A team led by University of Nevada criminologist Timothy Griffin looked at hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2006 and found that AMBER Alerts actually played little apparent role in the eventual return of abducted children. Furthermore, AMBER Alerts tended to be 'successful' in relatively mundane abductions, such as when the child was taken by a noncustodial parent or other family member. There was little evidence that AMBER Alerts routinely 'saved lives'"
There are further concerns with AA as "crime prevention theater" (much as the TSA is seen as homeland security theater), of the "crying wolf" effect, over 4 a.m. cell-phone alerts, over use where the Alert criteria aren't met, of distraction effects of highway signage especially during rush hour, and more.
Contrasting AA with a widespread and imminent natural disaster or civil emergency alert:
In the case of an Amber Alert, a very small number of individuals are likely to be in a position to assist at all, let alone actually assist, in a recovery. Risking "alert fatigue" should be a very real concern. I am not opposed to forms of widespread message propagation, but these should be done through nonemergency channels (e.g., a news or other scheduled statement or alert), rather than by distracting drivers, waking sleeping people, or interrupting people engaged in other activities, the vast majority of whom have no bearing on the outcome of the incident.
In the case of an earthquake, tornado warning, tsunami alert, flash flood, landslide, wildfire, or similar event, people over a widespread area have seconds or minutes to act and take measures which will directly and materially benefit them by saving lives, preventing or reducing injury, and reducing harm or damage to property.
To be honest, that exact alert is what made me turn amber alerts off in Android.. I live so far from Charlotte that there is no way it might be relevant..
That system is really poorly implemented in the US. I've received alerts for things happening in different states and haven't received alerts for things I know are happening in the county.
I would expect if they used it for earthquakes as it is I would get the alert on the East Coast and someone in California wouldn't.
It's actually not a japanese-specific setup. I got a japanese earthquake alert on my french Nexus 4. (and it was, fortunately, a false alarm; rare event, but that happens)
> But there's no way to reliably get information to all people within ten seconds.
This is HN, right? Come on folks. If I can send packs transcontinental and back in 100ms, then you can get a message out to the people of CA in under 10s. This is not a moon shot project. Our entire telecomm infrastructure operates in ms increments, not 10s increments.
Now, if only the SF startups could work on something useful like this, rather than yet another cat video app. You could even show ads for home repair companies and insurance adjusters during the warning/quake.
In tornado country, there are loud outdoor sirens that go off when a tornado is sighted. The sirens are audible to anyone indoors or out, and they are tested at a given time once a month.
Amber Alerts are pushed to my phone and I do not have to do anything to see them or know they are there. They sound an alarm tone and change the display. I also receive tornado warnings this way.
The other thing to note is that earthquakes are much shorter than most people think, usually about a minute long. 10 seconds is quite a bit of time compared to that.