LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Thousands of people in the Las Vegas Valley reported feeling an earthquake last week.
The 4.4-magnitude quake near Indian Springs is a jolting reminder Nevada is the third most seismically active state in the country.
An emergency alert system that would use your cell phone to tell you about a quake before it reaches you is coming to Nevada.
The system is already in place in California, Oregon, and Washington. Seismic monitors run by the Nevada Seismological Laboratory are being used for California alerts.
“There is no place in Nevada that is safe from feeling earthquakes… the entire state is covered with tectonically active faults,” revealed Christie Rowe, Director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at UNR.
The lab has 300 seismic monitors across the state and eastern parts of California.
“Those stations are sending us data in real-time,” Rowe explained. The monitors are constantly reporting shaking. A “X” social media feed shows the frequency of the quakes.
“We just did the stats. In the last five years, we have had an average of 15,000 earthquakes a year in Nevada that our network has recorded,” Rowe reported. Many of the seismic monitors are on mountain tops tied to a wildfire camera network.
“We built it so that it works off grid, off cell and so that we can hit the remote parts of the state,” Rowe shared.
Thanks to seismic monitors, last week people in Southern California got a 10 second heads up on their phones before a quake.
“The shaking from the earthquake travels slower than your cell service. So, after an earthquake occurs the network can detect an earthquake and then send an alert to your phone like, ‘Hey! You have ten seconds before shaking starts,’ and then the shaking starts. We are working to bring that to Nevada Rowe stated.
That ten second warning could have been life-saving for a man who died in Pahrump when the 6.8 Ridgecrest quake hit in 2019 while he was under a Jeep making repairs.
There have been even larger quakes in Nevada including a 7.3 in Pleasant Valley in 1915.
“In Nevada, we have been in this sleepy moment in between big earthquakes… when those earthquakes happen again, it is not a question of if it is a question of when, there are a lot more Nevadans going to be affected,” Rowe contended.
Federal funding is needed to get the earthquake alert system rolled out in Nevada. There are already seismic monitors throughout the Vegas Valley including at Red Rock Canyon in the west, at UNLV in the central part of the valley, one at the Desert Research Institute in Boulder City and at Mojave High School in North Las Vegas.
The Nevada Seismological Laboratory plans to add even more monitors especially around Vegas and Reno, the highest populations areas of the state.
If you feel an earthquake, the USGS asks you report it to their “Did You Feel It?” site. This helps develop more precise maps to show which areas are more susceptible to shaking damage. Here is a link: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/data/dyfi/
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