Scotts Valley company promotes early earthquake detection in Sacramento
Finding ways to get ahead of an earthquake’s destruction before it happens — that’s the message coming out of Sacramento, as lawmakers sift through the aftermath of Napa’s most recent quake. On Monday, NewsChannel 5 went to Scotts Valley to find out why a local company is getting involved, as the state continues searching for ways to improve future emergency responses.
Scotts Valley Police Department Chief John Weiss said his department is trying to learn from earthquakes like Napa, or Loma Prieta, 25 years ago. But he said if the state helped with cost of some early warning technology developed locally, he’d take the opportunity.
“Twenty seconds, 30 seconds, a minute, is a lot of time to prepare if you’re a school, a fire department or police department. It’s hard though sometimes to predict though where the damages are going to be the worst,” Weiss said.
Weiss showed NewsChannel 5 the binder his department turns to during an emergency, coordinated with the California Office of Emergency Services or OES. Cal OES, along with FEMA are also working with a Scotts Valley company with more than a decade of experience in early warning detection.
“The idea is to be proactive rather than reactive and we have to shift our society’s concept on this, when it comes to earthquakes, you know we have a very short window of time,” said Seismic Warning System CEO George Dickson
Dickson said his company shared its experience during the Aug. 24th 6.0 Napa earthquake with a Senate committee. He said his system helped firefighters in Vallejo get about a three second lead before the next wave hit.
“It has to do something for you when you’re that close, because you only have seconds and it has to also be able to get out to the masses very quickly before damaging waves hit,” Dickson said.
Dickson said the panels discussed what worked and what didn’t work during Napa, renewing the state’s commitment to local safety.
“We look at grants, we use grants regularly to try to help fund some of our equipment and so if the state can come up with some sort of opportunity for us to look at technology like this then we can see what we can do with it,” Dickson said.
Dickson said he sees the public-private partnership getting stronger, in an effort to make the technology available. He said his company already has 49 systems installed across the state and plans to launch a new network in Coachella Valley within the coming weeks.
