BART Inks $600K Deal With UC Berkeley to Improve Earthquake Early Warning System | Transportation

BART's board of directors approved a roughly $640,000 deal with the University of California, Berkeley, to research a seismic threshold that would slow or stop trains in the event of an earthquake at a meeting Thursday.

BART’s earthquake early warning system was implemented in 2012, and the server measures the intensity of earthquakes to safely control train operations and avoid derailments. Improvements to the earthquake early warning system—in collaboration with researchers at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley—are expected to be complete by the end of 2026.

According to a 2022 BART press release, the current earthquake early warning system was built with the help of the U.S. Geological Survey, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, and the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. If an earthquake is more than four out of 10 on the Modified Mercalli Scale, trains are notified to stop for at least five minutes and reduce speed to 27 mph.

“We now have more seismic information and system response data, and we want to re-evaluate to see if any modifications are needed to minimize service disruption and improve safety,” BART spokesman James Allison said in an email.

The plan is part of the ShakeAlert earthquake update, which received $1.1 million in funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and in capital allocations. Allison noted that most of the money needed to develop the earthquake threshold is spent on laboratory experiments.

PEER researchers have already completed the first two phases of the project by conducting literature reviews in 2020 on the seismic safety of BART trains, the EEW system, and BART’s train slowing algorithm.

According to Allison, the main challenge with this project was finding a lab with some kind of shake table that could perform a test involving a 70-foot BART train. The PEER center in Richmond is expected to do just that, as it is located near the BART train yards and is the closest test center with a six-degree-of-freedom shake table, the largest in the United States.

The current earthquake early warning system undergoes quarterly drills, in which a BART server intentionally creates a “scenario earthquake,” signaling trains to slow down.

“While this will not impact passengers and travel times during the project, the outcome will be one of the data points we use to balance seismic safety with minimizing train service disruption, thus improving the passenger experience,” Allison said in an email.

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