Shaking up funding

Northern California was rocked by temblor 50 miles off the coast of Eureka about 10:20 p.m. Sunday.
The shaker, 6.9 on the Richter scale, was strong enough to have done considerable damage had it come at another place and not so far under the ocean floor. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake centered near Santa Cruz killed 63, injured 3,757 and did an estimated $6 billion damage. It had a magnitude of 6.9.

The S.F. Bay Bridge damaged in 1989 earthquake.

Luckily on Sunday there were no reports of damage in Eureka, a city of 27,000 -- although hundreds of calls flooded in to authorities -- and geologists said there was no danger of a tsunami.
Earthquakes are common in California. In fact, of the 61 temblors reported worldwide Sunday by the U.S. Geological Survey with a magnitude of 2.5 or greater, 26 were near Eureka. That's simply life along the San Andreas Fault, the best known of the many fault lines lacing California. State residents are schooled to expect the unexpected, and until recently the largely unpredictable.
Last fall, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation making California the first state to get an earthquake early warning system. For years scientists have been working on a way to give the public a warning. They think they've got it.
The system is designed to detect the first strong pulse of an earthquake, a pulse that carries information about its size. That first pulse moves more quickly than the slower waves that follow and that do the most damage. The idea is to get the word out quickly, giving maybe a minute warning.
That may not sound like much, but a minute could give many people time to take cover, move away from overhead objects or even evacuate a building. The further you are from a quake's epicenter, the more warning time you'll have.
The California system will cost about $80 million to build and run for five years. The catch: legislation signed by the governor does not provide funding. Instead, the state's Office of Emergency Services was ordered to find possible funding sources by January 2016 and to develop standards of a statewide system.
No one can reasonably expect a warning system to
be thrown together overnight, even though California scientists have successfully run a test version for two years.
But neither can we reasonably expect real progress on this system without funding. Simply telling the OES to find the money isn't good enough.