- .In California reporting from the the
AAAS annual expo in Anaheim.
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- Bleepers will be used to warn the emergency
services and local residents when a big quake is about to strike California.
The bleepers will give people 30 seconds warning of the impending tremor.
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- It may not sound like a lot of time,
but Professor Tom Henyey, director of the Southern California Earthquake
Centre, believes it could make all the difference.
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- "You could shut off gas lines for
example," he says. "You could shutdown elevators, you could stop
trains on tracks - these are some of the things that could be done within
20 or 30 seconds, if you had that warning."
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- If you visit Northridge, the Los Angeles
suburb in the San Fernando valley, you can still see the scars of the big
quake that struck back in January 1994.
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- Measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale, it
was one of the worst natural disasters to strike the United States. 57
people died, a further 1,500 were injured. The fact that the tremor hit
at 4:31 in the morning meant there were far fewer casualties than there
might have been.
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- Lucky escape
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- "The shaking of most earthquakes
we have in southern California only last for seconds, literally,"
says local resident Keith Goldstein, "but this went on for a good
30 to 40 seconds of continual shaking. So we knew a major disaster had
happened."
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- Mr Goldstein was lucky, some of the people
who lived next door were not. The multi-storey building collapsed on top
of itself.
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- "The first floor disappeared - the
third floor and second floor collapsed and crushed all the first floor
units. And that's the building where, ultimately, 16 people died."
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- While southern California has 18,000
earthquakes a year, most are not strong enough to release the massive stresses
that build up underground.
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- Tom Henyey believes the region will live
under the threat of a really "big one" unless more quakes like
Northridge ease the pressure.
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- "We are not having enough modest-sized
earthquakes to release that strain so geologists are suggesting we need
may be a magnitude seven to get rid of that deficit."
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