Indonesia and Japan are working together to develop an earthquake early warning system that could use mosque loudspeakers to alert communities before tremors strike.
A five-year trial is assessing whether the loudspeakers used to broadcast the call to prayer can also serve as warning alarms, particularly for communities in hard-to-reach areas, The Guardian reported.
“Every community has a mosque,” said project lead Dr Inoue Hiroshi of Kyoto University’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute in Japan.
Inoue said the idea emerged nearly two decades ago while researching deadly earthquakes in Sumatra. Reflecting on the 2009 earthquake in western Sumatra, which killed at least 1,000 people, he said:
“I thought if Indonesia had the same service and people received the warning before the shaking came, then many people among those few hundred wouldn’t have died,”
Indonesia has hundreds of thousands of mosques, whose loudspeakers are regularly maintained and used to broadcast the call to prayer five times a day.
“The advantage of a mosque speaker is that they’re existing and well maintained,” said Inoue. “For any disaster infrastructure, maintenance is the big challenge … but the mosque speaker is maintained by the people”.
Researchers say this existing network could provide an advantage over systems that rely heavily on mobile phones, which may be affected when earthquakes disrupt communications infrastructure.
Breakthrough
Andi Eka Sakya, a senior researcher at Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency and the Indonesian head of the joint research team, described the earthquake initiative as a potential “breakthrough”.
However, the system is still being tested and does not yet issue warnings to the public. Sakya said the ultimate goal is to alert people as early as possible.
Because earthquake waves travel extremely quickly, communities close to an epicentre may have only seconds to react. A village 50km from an earthquake’s epicentre could have just five to 10 seconds to respond, according to Sakya.
Researchers are also studying how people respond to earthquakes in Indonesia and Japan. While Japanese guidance commonly advises people to “drop and cover”, people in some parts of Indonesia have survived by escaping outside buildings that are vulnerable to collapse.
“The way people react is they quickly escape out of the room,” said Inoue. “They know how to survive.”
The project is therefore conducting simulations and human experiments to develop safety guidance suited to local building conditions.
Similar emergency-warning systems using mosque loudspeakers are also being explored elsewhere, including Uzbekistan, where devices have been installed in 272 mosques to warn communities about floods, mudflows, landslides and avalanches.
