When Norway won games during the World Cup, so many people jumped up and down that earthquake sensors picked up tremors in Oslo. The same was true when Mexico won games; tremors were detected in Guadalajara and other parts of the country.
That's some impressive fan support. Vamonos, Mexico! Dra til, Norge!
But detecting the tremors also required some very impressive sensors — of the sort that can help insurers increasingly head off injuries and property damage from earthquakes, wildfires, and floods by giving people advance notice of the impending trouble.
Let's have a look.
Earthquake sensors are top of mind for me because of the 5.6-magnitude quake in late June that shook parts of Northern California where I lived until recently.
The governor's office bragged that the state's new early warning system had alerted more than 1 million residents before the shaking started in their area, drawing on feeds from some 600 sensors installed around the state. The system is also available in Oregon and Washington, and Apple offers a similar sort of alert system, drawing on sensors that others have installed.
But I'm most intrigued by what Google is doing and see it as a potential model for other alert systems. Google has turned all its phones into sensors that take advantage of the fact that earthquakes create two types of waves. One type (P-waves) travels very fast but does almost no damage. The other (S-waves) does the damage but travels significantly more slowly. Google's phones detect the fast-arriving P-waves as they travel through the ground, and, when Google sees all phones in an area lighting up at once, it knows S-waves and rumbling are coming.
It's rather like thunder and lightning. Google's phones see the lightning and can tell people that thunder is coming. (The obvious difference being that, in the case of earthquakes, the damage comes after the alert, while lightning is both the alert and the cause of damage.)
The systems don't provide a lot of warning. P-waves travel at 5-6km/sec, while S-waves spread at 3-4km/sec. So you'd need to be perhaps 20 miles away from the epicenter to get five seconds of warning. People will need to be educated about what to do with those five seconds (drop, cover and hold on) and become accustomed to the idea of alerts, so they don't freeze when the warnings arrive.
But the sensor network could still get a lot of people away from whatever might fall on them, even with a little advance notice, and prevent other damage, too. A woman I know was on an onramp for I80 in Berkeley when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit Northern California in 1989. The onramp collapsed, dropping her 30 feet onto a pile of rubble. The collapse not only totaled her car, of course, but had her in and out of surgery for years, and left her traumatized from knowing how many people were crushed beneath her. With just five seconds notice, she would have been able to pull off the road and stop short of the elevated roadway.
Insurers don't have a role to play in the development of networks like Google's and don't have to help with the sort of deployment of hard-wired sensors like those in California, but they can certainly assist with the education. Those that do will not only reduce injury claims but will earn good citizen points. At a time when insurers are looking for ways to engage with policyholders more often — not just when collecting premiums or paying claims — offering education about how to protect yourself seems like a promising avenue.
Sensors that can detect wildfires before they get out of control are likewise becoming far more sophisticated and are being deployed on the ground, in the air, and in satellites. Personally, I'm most intrigued by what's happening with satellites, both because they can cover nearly unlimited territory, almost minute by minute, and because I believe in having others do as much work for me as possible.
Google doesn't sell its phones on the basis that they'll detect earthquakes. People buy the phones for the obvious reasons, then Google adds a bit of software, et voila! A detection network is suddenly deployed. I think the same potential is there to add wildfire detection capabilities to the thousands of low-earth satellites that Elon Musk and others are deploying to facilitate communications. Let them pay for the expensive hardware and the launch, then add a camera and other forms of sensors that can look down and spot even small fires.
Floods, thus far, require dedicated networks of sensors, but there's progress there, too, as Houston is showing. Cities are installing small, inexpensive sensors that monitor water levels constantly, which usually providing hours of warning about developing floods. Cities can also warn motorists in real time to avoid underpasses where water has collected.
Because these networks of sensors can't just be piggybacked onto other hardware, progress can be slow — adoption remains spotty, for instance, in Central Texas even in the wake of the disastrous flood a year ago that killed 130 people, including 25 young girls and two counselors at a summer camp. But the technology is there and will continue to make inroads.
A rule of thumb I developed some years ago now, as part of what I call the Laws of Zero, is that you can assume that any bit of information you want will be available to you at what looks like zero cost (compared with today) if you look down the road a ways.
The concept is me looking for areas outside computer chips where the magic of Moore's law can apply. Moore's law — essentially, that the power of a computer processor doubles every year and a half to two years at no increase in cost — means that a unit of computing power that cost a dollar in 2000 costs roughly 1/600th of a penny today. So, free (almost) for anyone making long-range plans in 2000.
I won't go into all seven of the areas I identified, but it's pretty easy to see how sensors fit the Laws of Zero pattern. Moore's law will drive the cost of the computing and any memory toward zero. WiFi and satellite connectivity are becoming ubiquitous, so there's no marginal communication cost. Batteries are also plunging in cost, and many sensors won't even need them, either because they can use solar power (whose cost is heading toward zero) or because they're built into bigger systems such as Google phones or Starlink satellites.
The Law of Zero about sensors means we will keep seeing progress. Insurers won't even have to pay for that progress. They can just piggyback on what others are doing, then help policyholders understand how to take advantage of the progress — reducing claims while earning good will.
Cheers,
Paul