Was on the 6th floor of a tower. Shaking lasted almost 2 minutes. There was no damage as far as I could tell (Medellín) but they still evacuated everyone to inspect the building. City is in a bit of chaos, people are fine but unsettled, and the comms lines are clogged with people presumably calling their families.
Was a bit tense to see my phone alerts going off over and over, continually increasing the estimate of the earthquake strength, followed by the shaking getting worse.
For people who don't know, those phone alerts give you literally like 5 seconds of heads up. By the time I finished reading the first message, the shaking had already started. And I got the message while I was holding my phone and using it.
> IDK why it's so much more chill than the "child abduction" alerts I get.
Japan, who had the first earthquake early warning system, did research and discovered that scary sounds made people panic, which is a bad thing in a situation when you need people to act quickly. Their standard alert sound is a fairly pleasant chime.
The downside is that some people now have panic reactions to the EEW sound, since it is standardized. I guess sometimes you can't win.
If you look up the sound, don't play it if you are in Japan. That's extremely no bueno.
Some sounds are genetically more intense than others, like shrill screeching sorts of noises. So not quite as bad as the euphemism treadmill, because there is biology that makes certain sounds fundamentally less terrifying than others.
I regularly get "adult missing" alerts in Los Angeles, often with no more content than that. Absolutely useless. I can't think of any reason they send those out other than abject brain damaged incompetence or priming for some false flag.
Checkout the Japanese ones for iPhone. I worked at a startup once and a tester was in a room with 30 phones and they all want off at once during a quake. The sound of the apocalypse right there.
As someone living somewhere with a high chance of receiving a natural disaster warning I hate the AMBER alerts. How am I supposed to know if I need to evacuate immediately or just need to look for a car last seen three hundred miles away?
It's not even like the children's lives are in actual danger. Most of these alerts seem to be about custody disputes, in the vein of the kid went to his daddy's place for the weekend and hasn't been back by Monday 7am.
That's unavoidable. We now have shake alerts in CA but if the quake happens on the Hayward fault across the bay San Francisco isn't going to get much warning no matter what anyone does. By best estimates we may get 15s of warning.
15s is enough to book it to a close stairwell in some cases. I used to work in a dodgy building in the city. Any time one of those shake alerts hit, I would sprint to the stairwell and everyone would look at me funny. Jokes on them when the big one hits!
I agree and I'm glad we have the alerts. I'm just saying we may not get any warning and that's nobody's fault.
I'm also thankful that we have at least some seismic standards and have continued to increase them.
Look at how a country like Chile fares where they don't just have standards they enforce them. You can't bribe your way out of proper seismic engineering for the most part. Then look at Columbia which technically has NSR-10 but enforcement is... not exactly stringent.
The results are obvious. Where standards are lax or just as importantly enforcement is lax structures collapse and people die. Where the standards are good and taken seriously damage is much less severe.
Even here in San Francisco things are not all perfect. Sometimes things slip through the cracks like the Millennium Tower. Others are known: the city has a special seismic hardened firefighting pipe network with big metal rods that clamp the pipes together to prevent joints from coming apart. With special seawater pumps and even ship-based seawater hookups so if all else fails they can pump vast volumes of seawater into that network... yet that network has absolutely massive gaps that have been known about for decades and still exist but there are no plans to expand it whatsoever. You'd think the city would continuously invest in this system to slowly expand it over time even if just a bit. But nope.
You always need to act on it. Get an earthquake alert? Run outside. You can go back if it was a false alert.
In Mexico City the seismic alert gives like a minute (sensors are on the coast off Guerrero 350km away). Communities closer to the usual epicenter get almost no warning.
I don't see the point of focusing the conversation on Mexico City. You may be far enough from the fault line to have plenty of time to react, but not everyone does (as you acknowledge). You may not have tsunamis, but that doesn't change the fact that one needs to know WHAT to react to.
You are welcome to think it is ridiculous for needing 5 seconds to process what alert is going off. But the simple reality is no good disaster plan should assume that everyone will immediately understand what is happening.
I wonder if that is enough to help actually. Better that you be holding your phone than a knife or a pot of water when the shaking starts. On the other hand you are startling those people.
The phone alerts sound quite dystopian and unsettling. As if the earth shaking and feeling of imminent doom wasn’t chaotic enough, now you have yet another element of annoyance and distress added to the mix as a cherry on top. Just enough of a distraction in a life/death situation to tilt the scales in a negative direction.
There are different sounds for different situations. I don't know the regulations (presumably they exist) that say when a particular sound should be used.
The first is the default fire alarm noise in Britain, probably what I've heard most often.
I heard "LF Buzz" (2:32) in a nightclub, where it cut through the music. (I remember it as even more "yucky", maybe there were multiple sounders in the room.)
It could help people react better too by confirming what they are feeling is an earthquake and not a train or plane or your neighbors. It could also wake someone seconds before so they are more aware when it happens and not awakening in primal panic mid quake.
It isn't a huge help, but broadcasting to everyone in range of certain towers shouldn't be dystopian.
Google can detect major earthquakes about 15-30 seconds before visible shaking because of the huge network of accelerometers on Android phones worldwide. Those seconds can save lives if used properly.
Was a bit tense to see my phone alerts going off over and over, continually increasing the estimate of the earthquake strength, followed by the shaking getting worse.
For people who don't know, those phone alerts give you literally like 5 seconds of heads up. By the time I finished reading the first message, the shaking had already started. And I got the message while I was holding my phone and using it.