You are ready to integrate earthquake early warning alerts into your daily operations and begin taking automated action that reduces damage, injury, or secondary hazards. How do you access the necessary ShakeAlert® data to prompt these automated actions?  

An entity interested in automated actions has two paths forward for success: they can invest in an Approved USGS Technical Partner's (a.k.a. Licensed Operator) solution or develop their own automated alert delivery solution via a ShakeAlert Technical Partnership.

Investing in a ShakeAlert Licensed Operator’s Solution
If you are interested in automated actions, but do not have the in-house expertise to develop and test your own alert delivery solution, you can instead purchase a solution from a USGS-approved Licensed Operator. Most have the ability to interface with analog and digital systems, so don’t fret if your systems are unmodernized. Licensed Operators’ solutions must meet USGS mandated speed, reliability, and other technical performance standards. They must also provide appropriate education and training for their customers.

ShakeAlert.org provides the current list of USGS-approved ShakeAlert Licensed Operators. Browse their websites and get in touch to learn more about what solutions they can provide to automate actions at your facility. 

Develop an Alert Delivery Solution via a ShakeAlert Technical Partnership
The USGS is actively seeking partner organizations to implement alerting for their own use or for commercial use. These partner organizations are referred to as ShakeAlert Technical Partners. 

Under a Pilot Project, the Technical Partner’s goal is to develop and test ways to utilize ShakeAlert data to trigger automated actions that protect critical infrastructure/operations and/or prompt people to take a protective action.

 Qualifying Pilot implementations must meet the following criteria:

• Have the capability to be tested using ShakeAlert® test notifications and data streams.
• Be tolerant of system errors including false, missed, or late alerts and incorrect intensity estimates.
• Actions cannot have the potential to result in injury, damage, or loss.
• Final alert triggers and actions must be fast enough to be effective. 
• Train alert recipients how to respond to alert notifications.
• Agree to the terms of the USGS ShakeAlert Pilot License Agreement.

ShakeAlert Pilot Partners have access to the ShakeAlert Application Programing Interface (API) and data format documentation, a ShakeAlert® test service, and live streams from ShakeAlert® production servers. More information about Pilot Partnerships can be found in the ShakeAlert Quickstart Guide for Prospective Technical Partners. 

If you are interested in developing your own alerting solution, but not quite ready to enter into a Pilot Partnership, you can instead explore how the ShakeAlert System works and the products it produces through an Evaluation Partnership. This type of technical partnership does not allow you to take any action, and instead provides resources and space to evaluate if you want to become a product developer or customer of a Licensed Operator.

More information on each of these Technical Partnerships can be found on the shakealert.org website.

If you would like to talk about technical partnerships and your ideas for automated actions, you have a local resource - your ShakeAlert Regional Coordinator.  For those that reside in the state of Oregon, your Regional Coordinator is Lucy Walsh - the author of the ShakeAlert articles! She works for the Oregon Hazards Lab at the University of Oregon and can be contacted at 541.346.4654 or lwalsh@uoregon.edu. Reach out and learn how you can incorporate ShakeAlert into your daily operations while simultaneously building community resilience.