Earthquake early warning system for schools: A feasibility study in southern Italy

Over the last few decades, metropolitan areas have experienced a dramatic increase of exposure to earthquakes. Because of the still very low probability level at which short‐term earthquake forecasting is feasible, earthquake early warning systems (EEWS) currently represent an effective, pragmatic, and viable means for the implementation of protective measures to reduce the exposure of population to seismic risk. EEWS can be simply defined as systems that integrate seismic networks and software capable of performing real‐time data telemetry and analysis to provide alert messages to users within seconds of the beginning of an earthquake and certainly before that the S waves generated by the event reach the users. Worldwide, a number of EEWS capable of rapidly performing seismological analysis of ground motion during a strong earthquake are currently operative or are under real‐time testing (e.g., in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Italy, Turkey, California, etc.; Allen and Kanamori, 2003; Kanamori, 2005; Allen et al. , 2009). A tangible example of EEWS benefit is given by the experience of the OKI factory in the Miyagi prefecture in Japan that, after having experienced severe damages in 2003 due to two earthquakes, installed an EEWS, and at the following earthquakes experienced a significant reduction of losses (Allen et al. , 2009). Moreover, the Japan Meteorological Agency has shown the effectiveness of a combined on‐site and network‐based approach to rapidly broadcast the rapid warning after a potential damaging earthquake (Hoshiba, 2013). The key parameter of EEWS is the lead time, which is the time available for taking protective measures at distant targets once an earthquake has been promptly detected and …