Startup IBM and Grillo seek to bring low-cost earthquake early-warning equipment to Puerto Rico

With support from the Clinton Global Initiative, partners are calling on the open source community to help the Caribbean island implement economically friendly EEW systems.

Photo: iStock / petrovich9

In January 2020, Puerto Rico was hit by an earthquake over a period of several weeks, which caused destruction to homes and infrastructure and caused the displacement of a large number of its citizens. According to some estimates, economic losses from earthquakes in the Greater Antilles region that year caused $3.1 billion in damage. The Caribbean, in general, is considered a highly seismic region due to its location – it lies within the junction of the overarching tectonic plates.

What’s more, traditional earthquake early warning (EEW) systems, designed to give people time to protect themselves from seismic events, are expensive, with the result that most countries and territories do not have full-spectrum systems that cover their entire regions. . Enter Grillo, which calls itself a “seismology-as-a-service” startup, which wants to change the affordability and scale of such systems. In collaboration with IBM, the Clinton Global Initiative, and others, it is set up to provide Puerto Rico with an open source alternative, EEW.

Dubbed OpenEEW (Open Source Earthquake Early Warning), Grillo has launched sensors (also with help from the Linux Foundation) that feature relatively cheap open source hardware designs — those that can detect if the Earth is moving fast, and access cloud-based algorithms to verify of an earthquake occurring (or about to occur), and then providing alerts to people via a mobile or wearable app.

See: CIO’s Guide to Quantum Computing (Free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Dubbed OpenEEW (Open Source Earthquake Early Warning), Grillo has launched sensors (also with help from the Linux Foundation) that feature relatively cheap open source hardware designs — those that can detect if the Earth is moving fast, and access cloud-based algorithms to verify of an earthquake occurring (or about to occur), and then providing alerts to people via a mobile or wearable app.

More specifically, Grillo drives down EEW expenses by using the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, as well as Node-RED analytics tools and a Docker container solution. As Grillo says, OpenEEW is “a promising, low-cost and accessible option with off-the-shelf technology rather than the million-dollar systems often used today.”

Last month, former US President Bill Clinton announced $25,000 in open source credits and contributions from IBM, in line with Grillo’s proposed plans. In addition, the Puerto Rican Science Fund promises promising funding for the project as well.

Since 2017, Grillo has launched crews in Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica. The company now wants to make its technology deployable in other seismically active regions, such as Nepal and New Zealand. Puerto Rico will be the first location in the Caribbean to land open source hardware (at the moment, about 90 of these are slated to be placed around the island).

And why do so few countries have nationwide earthquake early warning systems in the first place? That’s the asking price to execute, Andres Meira, Grillo co-founder, told TechRepublic. “Japanese EEW is said to have cost about $1 billion,” says Mira. Addendum: “Other systems such as ShakeAlert and the Mexican Seismic Alert System (SASMEX) regularly require $10 million.”

ShakeAlert Early Detection Technology, created by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), is the EEW platform currently in use by the United States for the West Coast (i.e. in California, Oregon and Washington). SASMEX started its operations in 1993 and had an exorbitant price as well.

What is the role of open source volunteers in the project? According to Pedro Cruz, a developer advocate at IBM, “Anyone from the open source community can participate in and help OpenEEW; not just in Puerto Rico, but all over the world.”

“Different communities around the world can help by developing different components (sensors, algorithms, alarms) and deploying sensor networks in different countries,” Cruz says.

As previously reported by TechRepublic, “[u]Unlike the National Seismic Platform, the team’s open source EEW project is designed to create a global partnership rather than a nationalized network, allowing people around the world to deploy these systems in their communities as part of a larger set of human sensors.”

OpenEEW originated from Call for Code, an initiative to provide solutions, through technology, that can be deployed to communities with the greatest needs and bring about change.

“Since 2018, this movement has grown to more than 400,000 participants across 179 countries, and developers have already created more than 15,000 applications using IBM technologies,” Cruz said.

Call for Code was started by global pioneer David Clark Cause, with IBM serving as its founding partner.

In a press release, Grillo and IBM said that the detection code for their devices can be used as help by volunteer programmers and is being developed in Python and rolled out in Kubernetes. Furthermore, Grillo says it is currently working on a “carbon/interaction dashboard,” which the public will be able to see and interact with, as well as see recent earthquake incidents.

“There are also individual citizen scientists who install their OpenEEW sensors and connect to our global system in the cloud,” says Mira. He adds that they hope that “eventually enough density of these stations will emerge” so that the EEW appears global.”

On the OpenEEW website, it shows how one can start deploying sensors, implementing seismic detectors and sending alerts about what might happen.

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