Omar Diaz
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2014–2018
3:52 · 269K views · Mar 14, 2011
Home video of the 11 March 2011 Japan earthquake, filmed as an early warning system detected the P wave and gave seconds of notice before the shaking began. The raw footage shows the warning in action.
HN cites it as a concrete real-world example of how much warning earthquake early-warning systems can provide.
3 comments from Hacker News
And?? California building codes have improved alot since the 1980s or so. I remember the 1989 LA earthquake as I drove through the aftermath to visit my grandma about 2 weeks after, I live on the Central coast. All in all not since 1933 has CA lost more than 100 lives in an earthquake: [LINK] That tells me our building codes are pretty damn good. I work at ucsb and the catilina islands recently had a 5.2 about 2 weeks ago and the building shook abit. But all in all unless we suffer an 8.0+ I'm not terribly worried (knock on wood). To put that another way, realistically for any moderate sized earthquake CA is generally well prepared in terms of architecture, unless the big one hits ... In which case just kiss your butt goodbye. I do wish, even for the big one, that CA invested in an early warning system like Japan has ... Imagine a 5-50 seconds warning of an earthquake, that would save lives, not stricter building codes: [LINK] Here is a better, live example of the early warning: this video
Here's a video of Japan's warning system giving someone 30+ seconds of notice before the 2011 earthquake: this video (and notice how significant the shaking was, even at that distance) Here's another example of what you can do with ten seconds: [LINK]
People in Tokyo had a 60 second warning for the 2011 quake. Here's a good translation of the TV alerts from that day: [LINK] Phone alert: [LINK] Warning countdown: this video