How to Train Your Stakeholders: The Strategy for ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning Education, Training, and Outreach in the Pacific Northwest
Abstract
The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) System is currently operational on the U.S. West Coast. Improvements are still constantly being made to station density and telemetry, but pilot users are already using the system to perform automatic actions mitigating earthquake damage. However, before the system is rolled out for full public alert and warning, it is important to review lessons learned from other Alert and Warning applications (e.g., and weather alerts, and messaging from emergency management), and adapt them to making the most out of the extremely short-notice provided by earthquake early warning. Education, training, and outreach are critical to ensure people know how to get an alert, what it means, what effective protective actions to take are when they receive an alert, and what the system's limitations are. This is particularly true in the Pacific Northwest, with Washington State as an example, with the 2nd highest earthquake risk in the nation, but where the cultural awareness of earthquakes, their hazards, and personal protective actions is relatively low.
To understand how to overcome these challenges, social scientists surveyed emergency managers and first responders from Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia about their thoughts on the system and used this feedback to define a "successful" Earthquake Early Warning system. A successful system is one where: an earthquake is detected and an alert is sent, the alert is received by end users (both people, and technical/automatic users) and they take protective actions before the shaking begins, and those protective actions result in decreased injury and decreased damage to structures, resulting in a faster recovery time. Guided by this definition, and feedback from survey respondents as a guide, members of the EEW community in the Pacific Northwest developed a strategy to implement an EEW system in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. In order to achieve this success, significant education, training, and outreach are needed. Here, we share some key points from the strategy, and progress towards implementation of the strategy so far.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMPA33F1154D
- Keywords:
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- 4306 Multihazards;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4338 Disaster policy;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4341 Early warning systems;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4343 Preparedness and planning;
- NATURAL HAZARDS