Early warning device might help reduce loss in quake

On Saturday morning, Niu Pengfei was awake in bed, alone in his rented small apartment room on the fifth floor of a six-story building at Chaoyang Road, Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

Suddenly his handset gave off a high-pitched sound. It was around 8:02 a.m.

A recorded female voice from the handset counted down the numbers 28, 27, 26.... Being a subscriber of an earthquake early warning service, Niu knew what it meant. He jumped up, grabbed some clothing and moved rapidly to a corner of the room, near a table. When the counting reached one, the sound came again, terrifying, like that of an air raid alarm. And almost simultaneously, the building began to bump and sway.

When the jolting came to a halt, Niu, 23, dashed downstairs to the open ground. Many people were already gathering there.

News soon arrived that a major earthquake had occurred at Lushan County, Ya'an City, about 113 kilometers to the southwest of Chengdu proper. The quake, which China Earthquake Administration later announced to be of magnitude 7.0, caused severe damage at the epicenter and neighboring regions.

A massive nationwide rescue and relief operation kicked off instantly.

The whole picture was not much different from that of nearly five years ago, when a deadly earthquake hit Wenchuan, a city in the same region. The epicenters of the two quakes were 85 kilometers apart.

But one thing was new on the picture -- the success story of an early warning system. Its developer and operator is a non-state-owned high-tech enterprise, the Chengdu-based Institute of Care-Life (ICL).

ICL was set up in 2008 after the Wenchuan earthquake. Its founding director Wang Tun, 39, was a native of Dazhou, Sichuan, and pursued a doctorate study in the United States and postdoc research in Austria in the field of theoretical physics. Saddened by the Wenchuan disaster, he made up his mind to return and use his expertise to do something for his homeland.

Wang started with a seed fund of CHY 3 million (one US dollar to about 6.4 yuan) that he raised abroad from friends. His endeavor later won the support of local governments and the Ministry of Science & Technology, which provided him with more funds. In addition to developing software, ICL set up more than 1,200 monitoring spots in Sichuan and neighboring provinces. The network covers a total area of some 400,000 square kilometers, the largest of its kind in the world.

The earthquake early warning system, known as QuakeSolutionTM, was developed by Wang Tun and his team with full ownership of the intellectual property. The trial operation debuted in April 2011 and a year later several versions of the software were available for downloading on many smartphones. Operations in the past showed the system has a low rate of false alarm.