Many other countries have alert systems in place for certain portions of the population but a significant portion of the estimated 2.7 billion people who live in daily risk of experiencing a dangerous earthquake remain uncovered. IBM Developer Advocate Pedro Cruz in a recent interview said: IBM and Cruz, along with partner the Linux Foundation, teamed up with Grillo a startup based out of Mexico City, Mexico and Santiago, Puerto Rico to come up with a solution for Puerto Rico and the rest of the world. If my community had early warnings to take cover or move to safety, even just a few seconds before the shaking started, it could help keep our community safer. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Grillo’s work focused on creating a low-cost, open-source, easily deployed solution based on combining established technology such as seismometers with cutting-edge solutions such as cloud-based connectivity. According to Cruz: The goal is to make it dead-simple to create and scale earthquake early-warning systems to provide as much population coverage as possible. To this end, IBM’s partnership means Grillo’s solution is available as a developer tutorial on IBM’s website and will be packaged as an option for Call for Code entrants. We are complementing Grillo’s earthquake analysis tools with Node-RED, and helping the OpenEEW community expand a Docker-based container solution that can be tested and run locally. It can be optionally deployed to Kubernetes/OpenShift on the IBM Cloud as part of the pathway to building an open source community. As Cruz puts it: In developing the sensor technology and warning system, Grillo operated its solution in tandem with the Mexican government’s EEW and Grillo’s tech outperforms the state tech by a significant margin. Now, thanks to its partnerships with IBM and the Linux Foundation, it’s ready to deploy globally with a little help from the worldwide developer community. For more information on the OpenEEW check out IBM’s blog post here.
