Here's How to Get Early Warning Before the Next San Joaquin Valley Earthquake

FRESNO, Calif. — If you received a warning before a 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck Tuesday night near the Kern County town of Lamont, you were likely one of millions, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom's office.

The alerts originated from ShakeAlert, a public safety notification system created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that was deployed across California in 2019. Earthquakes travel so quickly across the Earth’s surface that alerts can arrive just seconds before shaking actually begins. But Robert DeGroot, the USGS’s ShakeAlert team leader, says every second counts.

“The recommended precaution is to drop, cover and hold on. It should only take a few seconds for a person to do this,” he said. Notifications could also be used by critical infrastructure such as public transportation systems, hospitals and fire stations.

“Anything we can do to reduce the time between when an earthquake is detected on the surface and something gets to someone’s phone — or a train slows down or a water valve closes or a firehouse door opens — anything we can do to reduce that time will be helpful to us,” De Groot said.

Shakealert relies on data recorded by a network of hundreds of seismometers distributed throughout the western states, as well as a handful of very powerful computing centers.

“This system is based on the idea that we detect the earthquake as soon as it reaches the surface,” says De Groot. “We transmit that information very quickly to a processing center, and… that processing center can, within about a second, determine an estimate of the magnitude of the earthquake, its location, and how much shaking is likely to occur around it.”

This information is relayed to Google and other companies, which in turn send alerts to mobile phones within shaking distance of the earthquake, similar to the way AMBER alerts and severe weather warnings are delivered.

Whether or not someone receives a notification when they should depends on a few external factors, including the strength of their network connection, but also the operating system their phone is running.

If you're an Android smartphone user, you should be automatically enrolled in public safety notifications like these. You can check to see if they're allowed in your phone's Wireless Emergency Alerts settings.

If you're using an iPhone, you may not necessarily be registered, and you can check permissions under your phone's Local Awareness settings.

To be doubly prepared, you can download a free app called MyShake, which sends instant alerts based on your home base and customizable notification settings.

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