The University of Washington and two colleges in California have won $6 million in grants for an earthquake early warning system that would give us an alert of seconds to minutes before shaking.
The Northwest could have such a system in as little as three years, the UW says.
Some people in Japan got warnings of the magnitude 9 earthquake there in March. That country has had a warning system in place for four years.
In the Pacific Northwest, such a system could warn of a strong coastal earthquake. The warnings could, for example, prompt railroads to stop trains before they cross vulnerable bridges or even prompt physicians to stop a surgery.
On Tuesday, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of San Francisco said it would provide $6 million to study ways to make an early warning system a reality.
"A warning system has the potential to save thousands of lives and millions of dollars in the event of an earthquake, and we feel it is important to resolve any scientific questions that could stand in the way of implementing such a system," Cyndi Atherton, director for science programs at the foundation, said in a statement.
The UW will get $2 million and use a quarter of that to put 24 sensors along the coast. The sensors will have strong motion detectors but also provide GPS readings to show how far the ground is moving.
The potential benefits are huge: A system could eventually detect the first signs of an earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone. The subduction zone, which runs from northern California to southern British Columbia, is thought to have caused a magnitude 9 quake in 1700 that sparked a tsunami across the Pacific.
The rest of the $6 million will go the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology. Those schools are testing an early warning system called ShakeAlert. That system opens a pop-up alert on a recipient's computer, listing the location of an earthquake, its magnitude and the time before shaking can be felt.
The California schools will do more work on that system. And it will be used as the basis for a warning system in the Pacific Northwest.
The Pacific Northwest already has earthquake warning systems, though they are inexpensive and not too sophisticated. They are used, for example, to have gates closed to block traffic to the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
At first, data from the new sensors will be used by researchers and a few companies.
"We have to learn what we're doing before we tell the public about it," said John Vidale, a UW professor and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismology Network, in a news release.
"I think at the end of three years we could have enough confidence to share the information with the public. But we have to have confidence, and we have to have a delivery system."
Some of the sensors could be placed along the Washington coast, but it's more likely that they will be in northern California and Oregon. The Washington coast already has sensors.
Puget Sound, Vidale said, "is the main motivation" for the sensors.
Vancouver, B.C., and Portland are vulnerable to quakes. But Seattle is more vulnerable, the UW says, because it is closer to the subduction zone and is more susceptible to shaking in a major quake.
The warning system could detect an earthquake of magnitude 7 or 7.5 within 30 seconds of its beginning, Vidale said. That quake could grow to a magnitude 9 quake along a fault line.
If sensors detected a magnitude 7 or 7.5 quake off Oregon or northern California at the southern end of the fault, Seattle could have a warning of as much as five minutes, Vidale said.
If sensors detected a quake off the Washington coast, Seattle could get a warning of 30 seconds, he said.
It's estimated that a comprehensive warning system along the West Coast would cost $150 million over five years, including $70 million in the Pacific Northwest.
State-of-the-art systems detect what are known as "P" waves â€” weaker energy waves that travel faster through the ground than the more violent and destructive "S" waves. Depending on how far away from the earthquake's epicenter you are, you could get anywhere from a few seconds to a full minute of warning, because the P waves would get to you first.
In the event of an earthquake around here, the best-case scenario would give people five minutes' warning, Vidale previously told seattlepi.com. It takes P waves about that long to travel the distance from the bottom of the Cascadia subduction zone south of Oregon to the top in Canada, he said. It also would take about five minutes for a Cascadia earthquake centered off the Pacific Coast to reach Seattle.
"The 'Big One' on the coast would be a fair bit" of warning, Vidale said, "but the 'Big One' under Seattle, it would be a few seconds."