An earthquake warning app proved useful in alerting thousands of Northern California residents to Tuesday’s 5.1 magnitude quake that originated east of San Jose.
The MyShake app alerted about 95,000 devices as of Tuesday morning, according to Richard Allen, the director of UC Berkeley’s Seismology Lab, who spoke with SFGate.
Some of those users got up to an 18-second warning before they felt the tremors, with those farther away having more time to “drop, cover, hold on” as the alert instructs users to do.
Since then, MyShake has seen more than 2.3 million downloads — an increase from the 1.6 million currently listed on UC Berkeley’s website for the app.
User reports provided to MyShake after the quake said that 7,200 people were in the impact zone of the earthquake, according to SFGate.
Of those users, over 4,337 reported “light shaking,” another 1,326 reported “moderate shaking” and 1,371 reported no shaking at all.
The app, while helpful, can’t do the impossible of predicting when an earthquake will occur.
“What’s going on miles below the ground, we do not have the ability to see that, nor any kind of instrumentation that sends off or records signals that we can take as a warning that one’s coming,” geologist Pat Abbott told KFMB-TV.
The app partners with the U.S. Geological Survey and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to deliver the reports.
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