Initiative Aimed At Monitoring Shaking Helps To Get Young Lives On Solid Ground
RANCHO CUCAMONGA (CBSLA.com) — What if the next time a quake hits, your house does more than just shake but provides important information to seismologists?
That's an aim of an initiative that uses low-cost motion sensors and places them on homes and schools.
Etiwanda High School in Rancho Cucamonga is participating in the project with Caltech called the "Quake-Catcher Network," along with several major universities and the U.S. Geological Survey.
"Every day, we learned more and more about all the earthquakes and all the faults and what's going on in California," said Luis Gomez, a college student majoring in geology after a foundation set at Etiwanda High School.
One such classroom at the school is equipped with a sensor, so any time there is any sort of movement, the information is uploaded to the system.
The system can indicate when the shaking isn't a real earthquake.
Researchers hope this will one day fold into an earthquake-warning system.
"Things like slowing and stopping trains, preventing airplanes from landing at airports during the strongest shaking," said Elizabeth Cochran of the U.S. Geological Survey.
So far, about 1,000 of the sensors are in California through volunteers.
The Chaffey Joint Union High School District has them in all of its 9 campuses.
"We've had a couple of kids that seen this data, seen these sensors, and it's actually inspired them to go on and become geologists when they leave us," said Marc Moya, a CJUHSD technical support director.
Bernadette Vargas says her students at Etiwanda High School were able to learn from local quakes like the one in La Habra last year and the more recent one in Nepal.
"While an earthquake may not happen exactly right here, we can still match our experience in the classroom to the experience that has happened somewhere else," Vargas said.
While earthquake warnings may be in the distance future, the technology is already helping to get some young lives on solid ground.
