Earthquake Early Warning Riskwork: ShakeAlert’s Operation with Institutionalized Uncertainties

Abstract

The US West Coast’s earthquake early warning system ShakeAlert detects earthquakes as they happen and creates rapid signals that can reach users before shaking does. ShakeAlert is an ambitious system, involving many entities and elements. Its development and operation require interdisciplinary and interagency collaboration. In this paper, we consider these relationships and their effects, drawing on participant observation and 36 interviews from between 2019 and 2021 with people in university, government, and industry roles related to ShakeAlert. We describe what is involved in operating the system as “riskwork,” referencing a sociological literature on the many activities required to do risk analysis and risk mitigation. To reveal the complexities of ShakeAlert’s earthquake early warning riskwork, we first outline ShakeAlert’s history. Then, we consider the experiences of developing the system during the years it began to be widely available in California, Washington, and Oregon. We analyze research participants’ reflections related to a theme consistent across many of their experiences: that of uncertainty. The uncertainties we consider here are related to the purpose of the ShakeAlert system, structures and processes for organization and collaboration, and system use and users. We show how these uncertainties are institutional in nature; related to the very interdisciplinary and interagency nature of the project and, consequently, difficult to resolve. We discuss interrogate their implications for the ShakeAlert system. Doing so, we raise concerns about how riskwork undertaken under conditions of these institutionalized uncertainties may reduce opportunities for members of some groups to participate meaningfully in decision-making. Our research contributes to efforts to document and better understand the riskwork entailed in hazard risk mitigation, as well as the institutionalized uncertainties that can emerge in such contexts. It is also our hope that it will also facilitate the mobilization of support for those whose work we describe. This paper foregrounds aspects of operating an earthquake early warning system that are rarely written about. It describes qualitative and descriptive research, and as such its goals are largely to advance understanding about the kinds of work that ShakeAlert entails, and so what other earthquake early warning systems and projects like them also might involve. Practical applications of findings might include (1) efforts to support for riskworkers who labor in conditions of institutional uncertainty, including acknowledgment of the challenges they take on and adjustment of expectations as possible; (2) creation of opportunities for riskworkers to network and build relationships of trust with each other to facilitate collaboration; (3) development of processes for assuring inclusion of groups key to a project’s success but not well networked with others in order to formally increase pathways for inclusion; and (4) reduction of institutionalized uncertainties where and when possible. While conditions related to ShakeAlert have changed since data was collected, practical applications of findings described here are also relevant to other interdisciplinary and interagency risk mitigation projects.