Inside Californias early earthquake warning system as NorCal, Japan, Venezuela rattled

As earthquakes struck from California to Venezuela to Japan, millions of people received warnings on their mobile phones, providing critical seconds to seek protection.Venezuela was struck with a pair of deadly earthquakes Wednesday evening and Thursday morning that brought significant shaking to the northern coast of Japan.Earlier in the week residents in the U.S.

state of California experienced a moderate earthquake, and at the start of June, 37 people in the Philippines died in a quake near Mindanao.Many nations have developed systems for alerting people seconds before shaking begins.Even in countries like Venezuela that do not have such systems, Google Android Earthquake Alerts can send warnings.Here’s what to know: California's top news, sports and entertainment delivered to your inbox every day.

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Never miss a story Several countries have Early Earthquake Warnings — sometimes shortened to EEW — including the United States, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, Romania, China, Italy and Taiwan, according to the U.S.Geological Survey.Venezuela does not have a national EEW.

Wednesday evening’s back-to-back 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes were among the strongest to strike the country in more than a century.Still, some people in Venezuela received warnings seconds or even minutes before the shaking began through Google’s Android Earthquake Alerts system.The warning system relies on crowdsourced data from the sensors in individual cellphones to detect seismic events and send warnings to other phone users in the area.It has greatly expanded since it rolled out in 2020 with 250 million people receiving alerts in 2020, to over 2.5 billion today, according to Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab.It alerts about 60 earthquakes each month to an average of 18 million phones, according to Allen�...