California governor Jerry Brown recently signed a bill authorizing an $80 million platform that will let residents of his state know if an earthquake is going to hit.

The platform is going to build 100 different monitoring stations across the state to offer 24 hour, real-time monitoring of seismic activity. It’s curent 300 stations will also be fitted with crucial upgrades. Although earthquake prone, California’s early warning system lags behind that of many other countries on fault lines, including Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Turky, Italy and China.

“It is a little ironic as much as California prides itself on technology and innovation that we’re behind other countries when it comes to the deployment of this system,” Senator Padilla said. “I’m thrilled that the bill was signed and I think it means good news for Californians everywhere that an earthquake alert system is going to be here sooner rather than later.”

Although the system is primarily analogue, and is based around a process built-in to the sensoring towers, Padilla hopes that California’s tech talent will take advantage of the open developer climate and recently open-sourced amber alert system to build a full-scale first response smartphone application.

via govtech

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