BurnsFamily Blog

L.A. had a 5.4 (moderate) earthquake around Noon today. To folks who aren’t familiar with earthquakes, you can certainly feel one of those but modern-built structures typically are unaffected. The Richter scale is logarithmic, so a 4.0 is 1/10th the energy of a 5.0, for example. The USGS says that the Bay Area is overdue for a “big one” (meaning, something around a 7.6 — so ~100x more powerful than the one felt in L.A. today). The Bay Area had a 5.9 on Halloween 2007. There are 800 5.0-5.9 EQs every year, according to the USGS.

FEMA advises that in a crisis you should plan to be on your own for at least 3 full days. When your cellphone, landline, and internet access goes down, how will you communicate?

It’s no surprise that even with a moderate 5.4 EQ, cell phones suddenly became unreliable. Too many people started calling all at once, and I’m sure some of the infrastructure (like microwave towers) may have been affected too. The California Office of Emergency Services gave this advice for both cellphones AND landline users:

“The big message now is don’t use telephones or cell phones in Southern California,” Huston said. “The systems down there are maxed out, and that creates a really dangerous situation when it comes to people who need to call 911 for an emergency.”

While some people have been calling 911 for general information about the earthquake, Huston said they shouldn’t do that.

During a major disaster, the advice is to NOT use your telephone unless you’re calling 911. Or use text-messaging if that’s still operational.

A Verizon spokesperson said that their “…landline service was affected…”.AT&T’s cellphone service was spotty in some areas.

The L.A. Times reported:

The biggest strains were felt in phone and Internet systems, which buckled due to overwhelming demand in the minutes after the jolt.

and this gem:

Accoridng to Verizon, call volume soared past predictions for emergencies.

“It was way above average, even for a disaster,” said Ken Muche, spokesman for Verizon Wireless. “About 40% more than the peak we expect during disasters.”

Near the epicenter “phones in the sheriff’s station worked only intermittently after the temblor”. The volume overwhelmed telephone company equipment. Many customers reported busy signals or just silence when trying to reach family and friends. Some landlines had no dial tones.

Summary: A moderate 5.4 event, with no serious building damage or injuries reported, caused people to overload their own cellphone network.

And it doesn’t take an emergency to cause your cell phone to turn into a paper weight. Phone overloads are nothing new after a major occurrence, even in sports:

“That’s very common after an event like this,” said AT&T spokesman John Britton. “It’s like what happens if the Dodgers win the World Series. Everyone picks up the cellphone and makes a call. It’s called network congestion.”

The phone companies have expectations and extensive models on how a major disaster or large scale media event will affect their networks. Clearly they could make capacity plans to handle this traffic but they choose to not do this. I’m sure cost plays a factor. No one would be able to afford a monthly service plan that guaranteed 100% uptime in the event of an emergency (just like no one could afford a car that was 100% safe).

I’ve heard rumors that the cellphone companies are provisioned to only handle 10% of their subscribers calling at any given moment. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but with no reported infrastructure damage in today’s event, cell phones were “out” or “spotty” for over an hour afterwards. During a larger event cell towers and underground lines will be physically affected. The situation will be much worse.

In the Bay Area’s recent 5.9 event cell phone networks and landlines went spotty/offline. Internet service was affected for some folks. One of the county’s “backup” communications system for the fire fighters was a cellphone network — it was unavailable.

Here’s the good news part of this post: Within minutes of the 2007 EQ, ham radio operators across 14 cities in Santa Clara County provided the County’s Office of Emergency Services with initial damage assessments from their cities. That was faster than all other methods they had at their disposal. The County planners were listening to the coordinated efforts of the “Amateur Radio Emergency Services” radio network and were able to immediately determine where best to send resources, how widespread the damage was, and which cities were affected more.

As part of their training, the hams were standing by to deploy to local fire houses and shelters and provide communications to these agencies. Thankfully, the event was small enough that no assistance was required. Disasters don’t wait for you to be ready. But if a large EQ hits, we’ll be ready. That’s why we train every week, every month, every quarter.

If you’re interested in being part of the solution for the Bay Area, check out http://www.scc-ares-races.org/