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> Washington deployed the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system just yesterday

Do you know how the early warning system works? How much advance warning do they expect to give?

The Earthquake warning system works through the fact that the signal travels faster than the ground waves. So, earthquake occurs and is detected. A warning is sent out. The amount of time between the warning and when you feel shaking is entirely dependent on how far you are from the epicentre. It won't give you much time, but it should be enough to get under a table, or to move away from windows that could break or things that could fall on you.

Tokyo got nearly 30 seconds warning for the Fukushima earthquake. I have no idea how well Washington's system works, but I would imagine that someday it'll be as good as Japan's was in 2011

In order for this happens, we really need an unified earthquake early warning network in entire west coast connecting from BC, Canada all the way to Mexico. It seems that all the existing systems are only regional so far. At the same time, we probably need to drastically increase the density of the seismometers.

All in all, the earthquake early warning system in North America still lies far behind to say the system in Japan.

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