BART took part in a demonstration of an earthquake early warning system. 

The goal of the technology is saving the lives of passengers in the event of a major earthquake.

That stationary light you see in the tunnel is an incoming BART train that has drastically reduced speed as it approaches the platform at the Downtown Berkeley station.

This is part of a test of the shake alert early warning earthquake system.

“In the event of a real earthquake, please follow instructions from BART personnel,” the BART overhead monitor said.

This is actually is Shake Alert 2.0, which was developed by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, University of Washington, and the University of Oregon in partnership with California’s Office of Emergency Services.

“It’s exciting to see organizations such as BART take the action necessary to adopt earthquake early warning and shake alert,” OES Seismic Hazards Branch Chief Ryan Arba said. “Timely warning of an earthquake could provide several seconds and in favorable cases up to a minute before the arrival of damaging shaking.

“The value of that, as was demonstrated today, we will have the ability to slow down or stop trains to prevent derailment and thereby avoid injuries and potential deaths,” BART Board of Director John McPartland said.

The director of UC Berkeley’s Seismological Laboratory and one of the creators of the shake alert system, Richard Allen, explains how it works.

“The idea behind earthquake early warning is that you very rapidly detect the beginnings of an earthquake, at the surface, close to the epicenter, you then characterized the area in which the shaking will be felt and then you push an alert out to people in harm’s way,” Allen said. “But the challenge that we still face is getting that alert out to every single individual across the State of California or across the Pacific Northwest.”

The reason for that is the technology to deliver an alert within a second to all 8 million residents does not exist in the U.S.

That technology does, however, exist in Mexico and Japan.

Look for that in Shake Alert 3.0

“And that is something, of course, we are working on very hard,” Allen said. “We are calling on the great entrepreneurial spirit to solve that problem.”

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