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The Israeli company Beeper offers a comprehensive solution for earthquakes detection and early warning system. The SeismoGourad was developed based on integrated Japanese and Israeli technology that provides an early warning before the actual distractive wave reaches a certain pre-defined area.
In Israel, the system was tested and approved by Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee as part of the measures and preparation for an earthquake.
The solution using the Beeper SeismoGuard unit was designed primarily to be used in public places, governmental and municipal building areas, schools and campuses. The current knowledge and experience does not allow prediction of earthquakes. Using seismic detection systems can generate a short term alert before the actual arrival of the destructive waves allowing sufficient time to perform emergency operations and preparation.
The alert time is being established by integrating all detectors and sensors of the “Seismic Fence” to Beeper’s national server in Israel that sends the alarm messages to the relevant regions’ early-warning-unit using a nationwide paging system.
The warning principle is based on the time difference between the arrival time of the “P wave” (the Primary wave) and the “S wave” (the Secondary wave) that causes the majority of the damage. The two types of waves propagate at a speed of several kilometers per second, but P waves propagate twice as fast as S waves, therefore the P waves come before the S waves and warn about the coming destructive wave.
Warning time depends on the distance between the earthquake epicenter and the alarmed location. The main communication links between the Server and the Seismic detection units (the early-warning-unit) are based on IP network.
A backup redundant system, also a paging system distributes the warning message to the early-warning-unit was proven as the best reliable and the fastest way to distribute these messages. Such messages may reach the early-warning-unit even before the P waves will reach the early-warning-unit area.
Earthquakes server calculates the location of the earthquake and its magnitude and send the alarm to the early-warning-unit which generate the specific audio alert. The layout of the seismic fence, the number of early-warning-unit and their location ensures maximum warning time, reliability and prevents false alarms.
The seismic detector used in Beeper’s SeismoGuard, the HS-301, was developed in Japan in collaboration with the Japanese Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED). Such systems are being used in Japan since 2007 using thousands of sensors deployed across the country and managed to alert on hundreds of earthquakes of different intensity.
