Peninsula 'Shake Alert' System To Be Tested Thursday

MENLO PARK, CA -- When Peninsula residents feel the earth rumbling like it did 113 years ago on Thursday, Menlo Park Fire wants them to hear about it.

The Peninsula fire district has always been a mover and shaker in terms of re-creating itself and transforming ways of enhancing public safety in the towns of its district, which goes beyond the borders of the city.

As experts have indicated recently that a sizable earthquake is long overdue in the San Francisco Bay Area, local public safety jurisdictions have geared up to protect the public with all the tools of the trade. Menlo Park Fire will put the latest to the test this Thursday -- marking the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake in which a 7.9 or greater magnitude demolished major parts of the city.

This week, the "Shake Alert" Safety System will be put to the test in serving to combine a community notification program through residents' cell phones and a loud, audible that holds the long-range acoustics as the envy of Josh Groban.

Menlo Park is testing the device designed as a community notification system at Fire Station 2 on University Avenue in East Palo Alto starting at 2 p.m.

These statewide systems are a unique to the Bay Area, Northern California and one of the first in California.

Last month, Oakland was the first city to test the state’s new Shake Alert system. Using a 60-block area, digital technology was used to notify cellular phone users in that area.

The aim is to provide area alerts for emergencies relative to earthquakes, floods, fires and other catastrophic disasters that keep Californians up at night. It's the hope and expectation the warnings will allow people to evaluate the circumstances in time.

"We’ve been working with our partners for many years to implement these incredible technologies that will help notify and protect our firefighters and the community While the LRAD public address system may seem to be “old school,” its anything but that," Menlo Park Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman said. "What we liked about it is that it helps to solve the issues we’ve been seeing on the catastrophic fires we’ve also responded to where people were sleeping at night or their cell phones were charging in another room."

East Palo Alto is 2.4 square miles in size located on vulnerable alluvial soils along the bay, primarily south of U.S. Highway 101 and on approach to the highly traveled the Dumbarton Bridge. Working with its city partners, the fire district believes a built out LRAD system could cover the entire area within a year or two.

As a community modal, Fire Station 2 was modernized and built to recent code standards when it re-opened in 2016.

Stanford geologist eyeing the earth movement

"We're statistically overdue," Stanford University professor and geologist Norm Sleep told Patch, referring to the propensity of a large earthquake. "Moderately-sized earthquakes occur all the time, but there's no bad time to do earthquake preparedness."

He cites anchoring the hot water heater as an example.

Sleep admits that scientists are still unable to predict earthquakes, but they track their activity when they do occur. Many have referred to the time period the Bay Area is in as "an earthquake drought."

There's a science behind their frequency.

"It's a statistical anomaly that earthquakes occur randomly," Sleep said.

The last large earthquake on the Hayward fault occurred in 1868.