An Israeli invention that provides early warning for earthquakes could enable every homeowner to rest easier. The size of a shoebox and costing $170, the sensor device is the brainchild of Meir Gitlis, who has been inventing things since... well, he was a child.
The world received an horrendous reminder last week about the power of earthquakes. The 8.9 tremor that struck off Indonesia's shore has claimed over 120,000 victims, almost all from the tidal waves it caused. Gitlis doesn't claim that his early warning system could have made much of a difference, but argues that any advance warning would have been better than none.
The Earthquake Alert - developed by Gitlis's R&D company Avtipus, and marketed by EQ Technologies - is based on the seismological principles of global earthquake monitoring systems. It contains an array of pendulums that naturally react to vibrations and send a signal through an electronic circuit to a chip. The chip analyzes the frequency and determines whether it's a sonic boom, a bomb - or an earthquake. Having that advance warning, according to Gitlis, can mean the difference between life and death.
"An earthquake is like lightning and thunder," Gitlis told ISRAEL21c. "First comes the primary waves which run through the ground very quickly. The instrument can sense the primary wave which occurs tens of seconds before the secondary wave, which is the destructive wave. The pre-warning of a half minute enables people to find cover."
According to Gitlis, Israel's tallest office building - The Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv - has installed the Earthquake Alert in its elevators. In the event of a quake, the system halts the elevator at the nearest floor, giving people a chance to get out and protect themselves.
Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo recently tested the sensor and deemed it reliable and credible, backing Gitlis's claim that the sensor doesn't react to sonic booms or other false alarms. According to SUNY Buffalo's National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (NCEER) director, Prof. A. Reinhorn, "the pre-warning devices provided a consistent response under the simulated ground motions, regardless of whether this was repetitive ground motion or another earthquake. No false alarm which could have involved spontaneous triggering or detection within the background noise (pretest noise) occurred."
Courtesy http://www.israel21c.org/