A new station in Chimacum to monitor earthquake activity will help give people on the West Coast “a critical warning before an earthquake’s destructive shaking hits,” according to …
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A new station in Chimacum to monitor earthquake activity will help give people on the West Coast “a critical warning before an earthquake’s destructive shaking hits,” according to officials with the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
The Chimacum School Board unanimously signed off on the plan to place the monitoring station on school district property at the board’s meeting last week.
The new station “will give people crucial time to take protective actions,”
Dr. Paul Bodin, PNSN Network Manager, told the school board in a letter that accompanied a land-use agreement between the network and the school district.
As part of the ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning system, the new station that will be installed at Chimacum Junior/Senior High School just southeast of the school’s football field.
The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, a cooperative effort between the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, and the U.S. Geological Survey, started in 1969 with five seismometers.
The network now has more than 300 seismograph stations and is the second largest seismic network in the United States.
Just last week, on Thursday, Oct. 29, network stations reported a magnitude 1.6 event just north of the Hood Canal Bridge, at a depth of 14.42 miles.
In his letter to Chimacum school officials, Bodin noted the ShakeAlert system can rapidly detect a strong earthquake, “and immediately sends out an alert to the public before the destructive shaking has time to reach them. This provides up to tens of seconds of warning before intense shaking hits, allowing people to take cover, drivers to pull over, tunnels and drawbridges to stop traffic, hospitals to pause surgeries, and gas valves to close.”
The Chimacum site will be named “UW.CHIM,” and the Chimacum School Board has approved a five-year agreement to let the UW install the monitoring station.
The agreement will be automatically renewed every five years.
The monitoring station will be powered by two solar panels, and wireless seismic data from the unit will be sent to an Ubiquiti Nanobeam puck antenna on the outside of the high school before the data is routed to an ethernet receptacle inside a classroom.
