Having more data points can help give more insights into the quakes propagation. I'm no expert but I'd imagine it's not perfectly circular an is influenced by a variety of factor that with more data points makes it easier to learn things about under ground and quakes.
It's highly imprecise, but not impossible. The alerts are already "this is over some threshold of ground acceleration", so there's an inherent severity estimate in the alert going out at all.
But expected intensity information isn't included because:
1) it's still a very imprecise estimate at that time,
2) actual intensity of ground motion (what you care about) will vary dramatically by location, and
3) people don't deal well with that kind of information in an alert that is really meant to be "hey, take cover".
When I was working in SF (Near Montgomery BART), there was an earthquake, but I was at the dentist at the time. The dentist was nearby on a hill near Union Square. The earthquake was not felt at all there, but it was apparently rather strong at the office down the hill.
We have a demonstration that it is possible just today, as the people who got an alert also got an estimate of the strength. The broadcast estimates were slightly low: 4.8 for a 5.1. But in the neighborhood.
I got a notification (in Santa Cruz) that mentioned a magnitude (4.9), a distance (~30 miles), and that I should expect mild shaking. I saw the notification a few seconds after it arrived, because my phone was making a weird noise, and the shaking started immediately after I read the notification. It was probably the strongest earthquake I have experienced in the ~5 years here, but there were several similar earthquakes every year when I was living in Chile.
If you send notifications for minor earthquakes like this, an estimate of the intensity is mandatory. At least in countries like Chile (and Japan?) where earthquakes are common. Otherwise people will learn to ignore them as false alarms.
I'm thinking the best thing to do is threshold the notifications to ~5 or above, so they're worth paying attention to, and a certain distance of course. Not an expert though. 5 is major enough to want to know isn't it?
I'd also say the average person has no intuitive sense for earthquake magnitudes and giving a somewhat precise number wouldn't affect their behavior the way a broad category warning like mild, moderate, severe, and catastrophic would.
I suppose the people getting these notifications really just want to know if they should scramble for safety immediately.
In Sunnyvale the alert hit with enough time for me to grab my mug (so it wouldn't spill on my laptop) and step away from things that could tip (TVs, bookcase, standing desk)...
Followed by a couple of tiny wobbles and then business as usual.
I grabbed my phone a few seconds after feeling the quake and Googled "earthquake in california today". I'm amazed that the earthquake showed up as the top result with an exact coordinate and magnitude.
Santa Clara had 2 seconds of advance warning, and Sunnyvale had 4 seconds. San Francisco got 18 seconds of warning, though was outside the "ground motion" zone.
My Samsung got the notification from Google too, so probably not a Pixel exclusive thing.
Though I wish it would have overridden silent mode. 10s of advanced warning isn't all that helpful if I only find out about the notification 10 minutes later.
You just reminded me to go into my notification history and turn on "Override Do Not Disturb" for the earthquake early warning notification. I really like the notification history for that; you can go back to a notification you dismissed hours ago and edit its settings.
Was this under the "Crisis Alerts" category for Google? Going to set it for my phone too, even though this kind of thing really should be set to override do not disturb by default.
Apparently my phone supports notification history, but it was also turned off by default... Bad defaults strikes twice in a row.
myshake pinged my apple watch while i was recording a cat. Cat definitely did not detect it before myshake, I don't think he even noticed it until the actual shaking.
Earthquakes move through the ground at the speed of sound. Once earthquake detectors on the ground near the epicenter detect it they send the information out at the speed of light, so even factoring in a little bit of delay for calculations, advance warning on the order of several seconds is possible depending on how far away the recipient is.
Santa Clara had 2 seconds of advance warning, and Sunnyvale had 4 seconds. San Francisco got 18 seconds of warning, though was outside the "ground motion" zone.
First time I noticed vertical, not just lateral movement. 5.1 isn't all that big, but this one was close to me. Good that the building is a wood structure, otherwise I'd be looking for damage now ...
similar experience here, the UI design is confusing, tell you to select an area but apparently you can't select/drag on the map, you can only typing the address then many times the auto complete doesn't work, and it seems you have to use the incorrect auto completed address...
I was getting those errors too a few days ago when I tried. However, the app does show my correct location. It either actually went through despite the error or is getting location in some other way as a backup.
Probably the latter since I think I did grant location privileges to the app.
The systems used to register new users are likely quite different from those used to notify existing users during an earthquake. One is write-limited the other is read-limited. The developers quite correctly spent their time optimizing their infrastructure for the read-limited case rather than the write-limited case.
You are of course free to not use MyShake. The project makes no guarantees of efficacy or advance notice.
If your bar is "it must work perfectly" you probably won't be satisfied with any earthquake notification or prediction tools for many years to come.
That said, this app provided value to many people during this quake, and likely has access to a much larger number of sensors than any other providers that the HN ecosystem seems to know about, so it's unlikely there's a magical additional service out there that's astoundingly better than this one.
But you're certainly free to uninstall the app and dis the company for not being perfect, that's your choice to make.
I'm happy they are doing the work they are doing and looking forward to them continuing to get better, as innovative technology products frequently do.
"Like it or uninstall it", what a shallow take. The app isn't exempt from criticism of course, and they can use the criticism to make it better. I can use it and criticize it at the same time. I'm not "dissing" anyone or any company by providing feedback. Your understanding of criticism is backwards to say the least.
A lot of Earthquake insurance companies are probably also getting requests for a lot of quotes. It'll die down once people see the quotes, coverage and deductibles ..
I live in SF on bedrock, but on the 5th floor of a ~100 year old steel framed apartment building. Definitely felt it, but nothing like the 5.1 in 2001, when I was on the 11th floor of the old Hamm brewery building in SF. That swayed back and forth way too much for my taste.
For the first few minutes a Google search for "earthquake" initially had it located some distance from "San Hose". Clearly someone was typing that it in manually.
Was at lunch when it hit. I felt it sitting down at a table. I looked at others in the store and I didn't see anyone reacting to it at all. It was kind of subtle but it lasted for 5 or 6 seconds. Just a little bit later, the earthquake reporting apps on my iPhone and iPad show a notification. Nearly 15 minutes after it happened, I get an alert on my phone from the state emergency services department reporting the shake. Quite useless, I'm afraid. A 5.1 is the largest we've had around here in sometime.
If you're close to the epicenter there's no way for any app to give you advance warning.
Any app is going to make use of the fact that internet messages travel faster than earthquakes, so the farther you are from the epicenter the more warning you'll get. Close to the epicenter is going to be no warning regardless of whose app you use.
South-East San Jose and I felt it. Received a notification on my Pixel phone as the house was shaking. Nothing broken, but for the 5-6 seconds it lasted I had the reflect to hold my monitors (on arms) because they were shaking.
The details are messier because groundwater flow very much does affect earthquakes (poroelasticity), but by and large, seasons don't affect groundwater flow significantly at the depths involved. E.g. wet vs dry weather doesn't matter. But on the other hand, a lake filling up or draining can, especially in terms of triggering very small earthquakes.
ShakeAlert and similar systems are awesome, but not exactly what most folks mean by a prediction, FWIW. They're meant for warnings of seconds, but not for things on the scale of minutes or hours or days.
Not to take away from ShakeAlert in any way though! Just clarifying that in terms of another comment I made about earthquake precursor signals.
ShakeAlert and similar aren't about precursors, but instead are about "the earthquake has happened, let's tell folks before the damaging surface waves reach them".
I really want to write up a long response to this... I used to be closely adjacent to this field, and I do ML work in other domains. ML is mostly irrelevant for this, though.
Here's the short version:
We're good at predicting where. We're still not good at when.
Understanding what segments of a fault zone have built up the most elastic strain is something we're really quite good at these days. Given historical earthquake data, GPS measurements of deformation, and knowledge of the geometry and makeup of the subsurface, we can reasonably accurately model what segments of a fault are most likely to fail next. No ML needed or wanted.
The issue with the "when" is what the precursor signals are.
The precursor signals we're most likely to be able to reliably measure involve drilling down and putting sensors on both sides of the fault zone and measuring the sonic velocity across the fault zone repeatedly. As rocks or even a fault gouge begin to fail, they have to dilate slightly so that grains can rotate into position to slip (bad explanation, sorry). This dilation causes a drop in sonic velocity. Stresses on the rock mass as a whole also have velocity signals. Lab experiments have observed this fairly reliably. We've actually set things up to measure this in the field as well -- look up SAFOD. There were some likely precursor signals (a bit contentious, but it's fair to say there were interesting signals in the data). However, this type of instrumentation just isn't practical to deploy at scale.
Other possible precursor signals involve hydrologic changes (e.g. well waters rising / changes in pore pressure) or Radon spikes, both due to the same dilation. Again, though, these are local effects and difficult to deploy a system to measure. (e.g. you need a deep borehole for the hydrologic changes, and the radon spikes are most reliably observed at depth as well)
There is one more controversial category that is easily observable: ionospheric perturbations. GPS data is sensitive to the ionosphere, and one of the things you need to do in geodetic GPS station operations is correct for changes in the ionosphere. We tend to have tons of geodetic GPS stations deployed along fault zones. Folks have noticed some very interesting ionospheric perturbations before very large earthquakes. There have been a lot of papers published on this, but it's still not too widely accepted, last I checked. The proposed mechanism (piezoelectric effect and/or dislocation glide/creep building up charge) and the observed magnitude of change don't match. It also has only been documented as a precursor around very major earthquakes (which are rare) and only in retrospect.
At any rate, tons of data don't help if it's all noise. The data that we think should have the most signal is _really_ hard to get. Things are still in the "promising, but a long ways off" state when it comes to predicting "when", and seismologists are _very_ careful to avoid doing work that could be taken as predictions due to past PR SNAFUs.
Lovely response, much more than I'd hoped for. Thank you sir.
I suppose another issue that then arises, even if we did have decent
prediction, is how to present and use predictive info. A "traffic
light" system leading up to a countdown? How not to scare people,
destroy economies with false positives and off-timing?
A strange conclusion from my study (for sound) is that where
eathquakes are concerned the next best thing to none at all is
regular earthquakes.
Well, I'm not a domain expert here, but I have followed this a bit over the years. Here's my understanding:
1. Prediction actually is getting quite good, just not on the time scales that we're interested in, which would probably be somewhere between weeks and minutes.
2. I don't think that at the moment we have access to input variables with sufficient power to be predictive on those time scales. Right now, I think one of the best predictors of large EQ's on short time scales is a sudden increase in variance of seismic activity. Which is sort of obvious when you think about it... The best predictor of a big slip is when it's already started slipping.
3. There have been good gains on minute time scale warnings simply by using sensors and communication networks that can outpace the speed of the seismic waves. This can actually be incredibly helpful for seismic sensitive systems!
In Canada, we have mandatory Amber Alert notifications that affect all modern cell phones. It is loud so you aren't likely to miss it. These alerts cannot be muted, and require the user to acknowledge receipt or another alert will come shortly thereafter. This helps to catch people during alert time in case their phones are not on, or they're in the shower, or whatever.
I am surprised California and other wobbly places don't use the same system, with the addition of quake and forest fire alerts. Everybody here knows the alert sound instinctively now, so even if you're in public and hear someone else's phone go off, we all know what it is.
We do have the same system, commonly used for Amber Alerts, Silver Alerts, Blue Alerts, fires, floods, COVID-19 lockdown, foreign missile tests, etc. However there's no mandatory ack, and except for "presidential alerts" they can all be turned off. That's what I did after I got woken up for an evacuation notice 20 miles away from me, feel back asleep, and got woken up again by the followup message 30 minutes later saying it was just a drill.
Anyways, the wireless emergency alert system has like 5-30s of latency. I suspect that might be enough to make push notifications a better solution. There's a # of apps taking that approach (full disclosure, my employer makes one of them), I think they all ingest data from a private USGS Kafka server
The WEA alerts use a pretty high threshold for whether or not to message people, and it's only been in place for a few years. It's possible you haven't been in an intense enough location during a 5+ magnitude earthquake. You might be interested in the ShakeAlert after action reports[1] which include maps showing roughly who was notified, how much advance warning someone potentially received, etc.
One downside with WEA is that it doesn't give a ton of granularity, so in theory they only issue them in areas where the alert will potentially save lives (despite latency concerns). One thing that the Android alerts do which I think is smart is to send out lower-priority alerts for non-dangerous earthquakes that still have enough intensity to be felt. Having that lower prio alert helps build confidence and trust in the system. Turns out people actually like advance warnings for smaller earthquakes, and unlike a real "oh shit duck and cover" alert those ones don't bypass Do Not Disturb mode.
I've always lived in Los Angeles and Bay Area until a month ago. But the one "duck and cover" earthquake here in the 21st century was probably before these alerts existed.
As other commenters have mentioned, they do have the same system in the US, but they actually use the proper alert types, unlike in Canada where they're all just thrown under the highest alert level that can't be ignored or silenced.
Japan has had this for years, but California's app for this is still in beta IIRC.
It's funny to me that one of the world's tech capitals has taken so long to get this rolling. To be fair, California doesn't have earthquakes as regularly as Japan (at least not of the same magnitude). I guess this is another symptom of our crumbling institutions in the US, we only get services quickly if there's a profit to be made. In the popular imagination, innovation is only the domain of private companies.
Technical detail, amber alerts refer specifically to missing children. The other ones aren't amber alerts. But seemingly all of them trigger a loud sound.
Actual Amber Alerts are the ones that bother me. If I'm in my office or eating dinner, I don't want to know about a missing child last seen 20 miles away
If it was actually localized, the volume would be okay. But I live in Toronto and sometimes get amber alerts from Hamilton for parental custody disputes. That's definitely not how that system should be conducted.
I lived in lake tahoe at the time and was a freshman in HS and was at football practivce at 5:04 PM when it happened, and my dad was waiting in the car and it car shook so much he got out because he thought us kids were pranking him by jumping on his bumper....
This 5.1 is a good thing, as it has relieved geo-stress... (I hope!)
but as a california native, I think of earthquakes like I do california poppies (which I just planted a bunch of) they are magnificent, just dont pick any...
EDIT: The 1989 earthquake was also in october.... October 11 I think... but I wonder if the seasonal shift in temperatures affect earthquakes. As October is generally the best month in the bay area weather-wise...
I was in an office tower in Santa Clara, about half way up, on the sixth floor. The building swayed so much I thought it would pitch over and kill me. But the valley had gotten off easy compared to the Santa Cruz Mountains. My brother's home looked like a giant toddler and played with it for half an hour before putting it down again. If we had gotten that kind of treatment in Santa Clara I wouldn't be able to write about it.
That earthquake shook me deeply. It's not a coincidence that I now live on a whole different tectonic plate.
You seem to be writing to correct the commenter above, but in fact the commenter is correct. Because the M scale is logarithmic, you need a lot of M5's to release energy equivalent to an M6. So, the M5's aren't helping to suppress the M6's. A few seconds of searching will turn up authoritative sources on this oft-heard misconception.
I flew to the bay area for the first time in spring of '90 for a business trip. I was driving in my rental car with my paper street map(s). I went to cross the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and, well, a lot of was gone because of the quake.
Was in the Santa Cruz area at football practice in 1989. My knees were in my face. We were not able to go into our house for a week until it was determined safe. Us and all our neighbors camped in our front yards and had a huge block party. The community was left to fend for ourselves with no water and no power but everyone coming together. Grocery stores opening with no power letting in like 20 people at a time. It was probably the most a part of a community I ever felt in California. Hiking Nisene to see the epicenter was cool. Me and some other football players went around looking for people that could use overexcited football linemen teenager help. We moved so many trees/branches, and were feed so much BBQ steak (no power so everything in fridges was getting grilled up and shared).
So funny that you say this... my grandfather in Saratoga CA - he went "oh I forgot something" and ran back into the house and came out with a bar-full of things in his arms and served Gin-n-tonics to all the neighbors on their lawn just after the quake (my grandfather was a nuke eng that built nukes for GE at the time, but was a really funny norwegian punster... and he knew how to make everything a party)
I caught a much smaller one when I was young and had the exact same reaction your dad did, sitting in a parking lot with no one around. I had a better excuse than him: I was in central Indiana, and who ever heard of a quake there?
(No, not looking forward to another New Madrid quake.)
The stories of the New Madrid quakes are insane. The earth was literally rolling, fissures opened up spewing enough gases to block out the light and more. And the aftershocks went on for months. Hard to imagine.
My home office in Campbell (just south of SJ) is on the second floor so I got more of a shake than my wife downstairs got, though her MyShake app gave her a few seconds warning.
For those not in earthquake country, this was a moderate quake, not big enough to cause damage other than maybe knocking something over right near the center. The epicenter was in Joseph Grant Park to the east of San Jose, near Mount Hamilton.
Weird. I am also in Alameda and didn't feel it but my kitchen cabinet door was slightly tapping against the cabinet which caught my attention. This is on the east end.
I felt in San Francisco. I was on the sixth floor of one of the buildings in Civic Center. The shaking was pretty mild (which I'd expect given facts of what happened), but the duration was rather longer than many of the smaller nearby quakes you're likely to feel.
I didn't get any notification on my phone. How does it try to figure out whether you should get one? Do you need to turn on location services, have a cell tower connected, or is it detecting pre-waves (I really know nothing about earthquakes) using the accelerometer?
There are different systems. The more critical system in the USA, WEA is a mandatory (FCC rules) central system that most consumer devices and consumer networks take part in. The "last mile" technology varies by network type and version.
The GSM lineage (including 4G, LTE, 5G) is implemented using cell broadcast which is a protocol data unit that solves for the one to many problem. Extensions added geo-fencing & geo-targeting on the client devices (device compares its idea of location to the incoming message), and also cell based routing optimizations network side. The cell broadcast part is technologically available ~everywhere as a result of broad GSM deployment, but whether it is integrated into an alert system is a jurisdiction issue. Sadly few countries (in the global scope) have the kind of power of the US or the EU to gain access to things like extended on device features.
The app based systems are largely based on some form of location reporting and push messages which are far less reliable - one to one messaging systems (like Apple/Google push notifications) are physically impossible to scale for real time sub-second alerting in dense populations, given the bandwidth constraints of radio.
CB is expensive at the radio tower, and can disrupt normal communications (potentially including emergency services communications) as such it's use is more limited than other solutions, for example in todays event it was only used in an area of about a 25km radius. To put this in some context, many folks commenting here, including myself still in the "felt it" areas were within a ~90km radius (SF is about 85km away from the center).
Notably, these earthquake alerts do not go through the WEA system or an app. Or at least they don't follow the normal w e a path from the cell tower. They go through the operating system itself which is why they are received on Android and not iPhone. Apple has not integrated the functionality into their operating system. With iPhones you can get third-party apps however.
You can always hang the sense of it and pass the time :-)
I wasn’t in the area, but I believe WEA would have been sent in the inner ~20km based on the system report, which is sjc and the surrounding area just up to the southern tip of the bay.
An expert may have more information, but I think it is a broadcast message from all towers in a given region. That is, every phone that is attached to this tower gets a message.
Interesting, we definitely felt it in Menlo Park. Perhaps being on the second floor made it more noticeable? What stood out to me was how long it was — it felt like we were moving for 15-20 seconds, though it could have been shorter.
That was one of my first memories and a totally wild experience as a young child in a hotel room on market st. I got to eat nothing but strawberry milk for about three days since since that was about all we could easily get, or so I remember.
These are all obvious answers. Still begs the question of what's the value of having these discussions here. There are plenty of discussions that are not permitted on HN (even if they would garner useful discussion). I only posit that this type of news also lends no value to this forum (SV locals don't or shouldn't depend on HN for local emergency news), and so should be removed/banned. Just my 2¢ - downvote away.
the value is connection. you're free to disregard that, but as humans, and not automatons, we sell to connect to out fellow humans in more ways than work. now, you can point out that it's a very SV-centric post, and it is, but there's a ton of other SV news here, so that objection's probably moot. Other regions of the world experience earthquakes and the discussion of the science and technology behind the early warning system that was deployed is interesting beyond the bay area.
I find it helps to remember that I don't have to click on every link on this site. If something doesn't look particularly appealing to me, I remind myself that there are other folks who read the site too, and while I don't understand why some of the things here are interesting to folks it's still OK that they are here - I am not the sole member of the "target audience". I just skip that link and read something more appealing.
There is fascinating science and technology associated with earthquakes, as well as interesting stories and history (though fewer of those in this thread)
The key part of my comment was "things like this". While this earthquake wasn't anything to write home about, a think like this, an earthquake, could easily be much worse, and therefore deeply impact folks that live here. It hasn't been that long since Loma, and that could be said to have deeply impacted those that lived there then, and still impacts us that do today, no?
HN works on a voting system, so that people can register what they feel is important, and if enough people do that then things show up on the front page.
it's interesting to compare and contrast your experience with someone else's. And since this is an experience everyone around here has had, we have it all in common, unlike say if there's a robbery on 1st street which might affect less than .0000001% of users on this site.
It was not in the least terrifying and actually a big yawn; no known damage or injuries; "near San Jose" is inaccurate, it was 14km east of San Jose up the (fairly sparsely-populated) foothills near Alum Rock, 6.9 km depth, 37.311°N 121.677°W, inside Joseph D. Grant Park, zipcode 95140, total population only a tiny 191. So, remote, not urban and nothing like all those San Andreas movies. We felt the floor ripple for a couple of seconds and that was all. All transit is still running, just at reduced speeds (standard practice just in case there's a big aftershock, which there almost never is).
You want to worry about something that's actually broken, then worry about whether the US MNT will get it together to call up leading goalscorer Jordan Pefok by 13 Nov deadline for the World Cup. Now that's worth losing sleep over. Or worry about Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico reconstruction from Hurricane Ian; Cuba got it bad.
PPS: in that area, Mt Hamilton (4265') and Lick Mill Observatory are worth a visit. And over west in Menlo Park visitors can visit the USGS station for free, that's a very fun and educational thing to do.
This comes off a bit as minimizing/dismissing concern of the next big one, and also seems to be expressing disappoint that this one wasn’t more exciting instead of being “a big yawn; no known damage or injuries.”
Nonsense, I live in Silicon Valley for 23 years now, this has nothing whatsoever to do with "the next big one", today's one was purely a 5.1 in a remote sparsely-populated area up the hills inside a county park with no reported damage or injuries, population only 191 and they hardly even have any two-storey buildings inside the entire park, not that those were reported damaged either. By the way, IIUC from geologists it's actually good and healthy to have frequent small earthquakes to blow off pressure and avoid becoming the "next big one", hence today's non-event is good news not bad news. I actually showed you multiple ways to instantly read the USGS data (coords, intensity, depth, population, total lack of buildings higher than two stories) to understand that this was a non-event not the "next big one", not even in the neighborhood. Technical literacy matters, sensationalism seriously doesn't.
Today's non-event was actually a Good Thing in that it also gives us yet another occasion to calibrate earthquake early-warning sensors, to stay prepared for any actual serious earthquake, which this wasn't.
I also said nothing whatsoever about "excitement" or "disappointed", so do not misrepresent me. I did imply that media is increasingly sensational (which it is) and lazily skewed towards merely collating cellphone "eyewitness reports" from places with 4G coverage, without making any semi-objective comparison to the rest of the planet; and I correctly pointed out that zero people were affected here in SJ today whereas 11 million Cubans were affected by Hurricane Ian [0], to pick one obvious example. I also know some friends-of-friends whose house was severely damaged by the 11/2020 Marikina, Manila floods/Typhoon Vamco/Ulysses [1] (98 deaths, 19 missing, 360K rescued, ~43000 houses damaged).
Also, a magnitude 6.2-6.5 struck rural northern Luzon, Philippines earlier today [2], no reported damage or injuries [3], but noone's mentioning that.
From that It’s clear you didn’t intend to minimize earthquakes in general which is good, it was just a matter of not the best wording/phrasing.
“Big yawn” is a loaded word:
It was not in the least terrifying and actually a big yawn; no known damage or injuries; …
Dismissing earthquakes:
nothing like all those San Andreas movies. …
Minimizing risk: in case there's a big aftershock, which there almost never is.
Comparing earthquakes to sporting events:
You want to worry about something that's actually broken, then worry about whether the US MNT will get it together to call up leading goalscorer Jordan Pefok by 13 Nov deadline for the World Cup
Experts believe a major quake in the Bay Area is “likely” (>=6.7) by 2032 per the usgs
It was already clear from my first post; you could have simply asked questions, instead of claiming you knew my intent and posting wrong assumptions.
The topic here was never "the next big one" or "major future event on the Hayward and San Andreas Faults for the next 30 years". If you want to start a separate HN thread discussing either of those, you're free to. This ain't it.
I actually dug up the USGS report to cite the epicenter, depth, intensity to teach people here basic literacy to make them immune from sensationalist reports without context. I showed what zipcode was affected and correctly stated how its population is almost zero and has no tall structures. Hence, "big yawn" is ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶l̶o̶a̶d̶e̶d̶, it's a 120% accurate characterization of an earthquake miles up the foothills inside a county park. I'm not going to misrepresent those facts. I can't see why anyone else would.
̶M̶i̶n̶i̶m̶i̶z̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶r̶i̶s̶k̶ Correctly stating that the risk of aftershock on today's event was minimal, and even in the tiny likelihood there had been one, given the original 5.1 caused zero reported damage, a (say) 4.6 aftershock would likely cause... zero damage. Zipcode 95140 is not downtown SJ or SF or LA.
To do otherwise would be to distort the facts on today's non-event into some emotionally-driven narrative that minimizes other actually serious events which actually resulted in deaths, injuries, destroyed houses, power outages; why should we distort the facts like that? It's actively harmful.
Sure, people can be needlessly frightened by sensationalist media reports, while simultaneously ignoring other natural disasters which flattened countries. Surely that's a trend we should fight against, yes; not contribute to?
> Experts believe a major quake in the Bay Area is “likely” (>=6.7) by 2032 per the USGS
That was never the topic of this thread, also many of us who already all knew that a decade ago. So why try to hijack this thread with that? By all means start a separate thread to discuss it, and I'll contribute constructively over there.
̶C̶o̶m̶p̶a̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶e̶a̶r̶t̶h̶q̶u̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶p̶o̶r̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ Comparing distorted sensationalism around non-events, to other contemporary events, including other natural disasters: "Or worry about Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico reconstruction from Hurricane Ian; Cuba got it bad." Even failing to accurately identify the epicenter, intensity and depth (facts which are typically available within a few minutes on USGS.gov) actively pander to that sensationalism; I posted them; you haven't discussed them once.
To summarize: today's non-event in 95140 caused zero deaths, zero injuries and zero damage; compared to others that actually impacted people and continue to over a month later, like Hurricane Ian. The earthquake early-warning systems worked as intended and that experience makes us stronger for the future. (By comparison, PG&E-started fires and electricity outages have caused far more disruption this year than earthquakes (:zero), and again that's a major political issue currently in California, not this.)
Almost any other minor media story is more worthy than this one, this in particular on a day with multiple huge stories (foreign and domestic) worthy of coverage. Pick any other story worth being covered more, to replace the US soccer one.
> Correctly stating that the risk of aftershock on today's event was minimal
We’ll this is terminologically correct due to that fact that if a stronger one follows then the initial one is a foreshock and the stronger one they prepared for is not an aftershock but the main event.
Anyway, I gave unsolicited feedback. Reject it or embrace it, no matter.
You're intentionally misrepresenting me: I clearly said:
> You want to worry about something that's actually broken, then worry about whether the US MNT... _Or worry about Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico reconstruction from Hurricane Ian; Cuba got it bad._
So, we already established within a handful of minutes that zero Californians were affected, but 12 million Cubans, or many thousands of Haitians or Puerto Ricans. Yet we're wasting time debating the California non-event instead of any other thing that actually matters. Or even, at absolute minimum, teaching people the technial literacy to quickly understand that the CA earthquake had no impact, and thus to resist sensationalism. It was extremely clear from the original that that was my point.
To state the same point another way: even (say) tonight's Fetterman-Oz debate (PA Senate race) will have more permanent impact on people's lives. Or, Hurricane Ian. Like I said.
Even if you didn't feel but live in the Bay Area please fill it out, they need that data too!