A strategic new initiative will open source and deploy internet of things-based earthquake early-warning systems to bolster the safety and preparedness of people in seismically-active communities across the world—and beyond the scant places that currently leverage such alarm-producing tools.
Through the OpenEEW project from earthquake-sensing startup Grillo and launched with support from IBM, the U.S. Agency for International Development, nonprofit the Linux Foundation and others, developers and citizen scientists can help unleash sensors, monitor earthquake activity and deliver alerts in moments of risk.
Earthquakes threaten billions of people globally, but inhabitants of only a scattered few areas currently have access to systems that can predict when shakes are imminent.
“The ultimate goal [of OpenEEW] is to place more of the world's population in a position to enjoy the security of living with an early-warning system, which today is only afforded to select populations in the West Coast of the United States, Japan, several cities in Mexico, and Taiwan,” Grillo Co-Founder Andres Meira told Nextgov via email Tuesday. “While timely alerts can save lives in the communities where earthquakes pose the greatest threat, these systems [can] cost more than $1 billion dollars.”
Over the last three years, Grillo developed and deployed sensors, and means to rapidly produce earthquake-early warnings, or EEWs, at lower-costs than existing, traditional systems. OpenEEW, according to Meira, will provide a standard for communities to easily adopt that holds promise to scale as a universal solution. Through tapping into evolvin ..
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