ELLENSBURG, Wash. - The old adage goes like this: "Earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do."
Tim Melbourne reminded me of that old saying this morning. He's in charge of PANGA, the Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array, a group of 370 global positioning stations arranged throughout Washington, Oregon and the lower tier of British Columbia.
But PANGA doesn't measure earthquake waves like those squiggly lines on a seismometer, PANGA measures earth movement long before an earthquake strikes. For example, a GPS station at Pacific Beach is moving northeast about one inch a year, Seattle is moving northeast about half an inch each year. What that means is that Western Washington is being compressed like a spring, and when that spring lets go and all that built-up energy is released in a huge quake like the 8.8 magnitude event in Chile just weeks ago, Western Washington will suffer the similar consequences. Only Western Washington could see even larger quake of magnitude 9 or greater.
It's the issue of that threat where the stimulus money comes in. Melbourne says the monitoring network of GPS stations is vulnerable to all that shaking. And that network could give immediate warning that a quake has started and is making its way to the populated areas of Puget Sound. That warning would be tens of seconds... not much... but the data could immediately tell first responders like fire fighters were the damage would be more likely and where they should concentrate their efforts. This GPS information would also give them information about which bridges were subjected to less shaking than others.
The money would go to replacing 62 GPS stations with better GPS antennas, receivers and mounting platforms called monuments. At $20,000 an install, these quake survivable stations would also transmit their information by radio, rather than over the cell phone network that's likely to be jammed with calls or disrupted by the quake.
And why is PANGA run out of this Central Washington City? Ellensburg would likely survive such a quake and could keep tabs on the science and provide guidance for emergency agencies after the initial shock.
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