Rapid Response Group
Meeting Notes October 9, 2008

Attending: Withers, Horton, Patterson, Deshon, Rabak, Boyd, Dry.

The committee reviewed the charge from the Director:

Maintain an action plan for CERI following felt earthquakes in terms of instrument deployment and media interaction. Evaluate responses and make changes to the plan as necessary. Report when appropriate.

The committee decided to add Michelle Dry and Holly Withers as members because they have central roles in the CERI response following an earthquake (coordinator and analyst respectively).

The committee briefly reviewed the plan and the talking points and then moved into the Mt Carmel post mortem.

The committee agreed that it would meet again in about a month at a TBD time. The rest of this report is observations from the Mt Carmel earthquake.

Michelle filled the coordinator role from house 0 instead of house 1 and that seemed to work well (perhaps because so many people were at the SSA meeting in Santa Fe). The media call triage proceeded smoothly and 387 citations were eventually performed.

Kathy posted relevant information to the CERI web page. The RRG talking points document was not used because it is NMSZ specific and not relevant to this WVSZ earthquake. Gary instead consulted with Art Frankel to get the appropriate tectonic background. The document used was requested by the committee so that we can build a library of zone specific documents for future use.

Information updates are available more frequently than they are posted to recenteqs on the web. Therefore field personnel are enouraged to consult with analysis staff prior to deployment.

There were no triggers avaialable from the strong motion sensors because of a firmware bug. Hence only 50sps data is available from the accelerometers. There are 100sps data from the broadbands. The problem is being corrected.

We need to be more formal and timely with the post event evaluation. Every event should be evaluated with a written report. "Every event" is not well defined but we should know it when we see it.

Currently Horton and Brewer are the backup analysts when Withers and Withers are unavailable. This means that if there is a vigoruous aftershock sequence, Horton may not be available for field deployments. We need to expand the pool of analysis people. Should students be able to help with processing aftershocks? Other places have a seismologist on duty. Mitch noted that the current system is non-trivial to learn and easy to forget. ANSS is distributing jiggle and CISN software. It is running at HVO and is supposed to be spreading to regional centers shortly. There will be more about this at the upcoming ANSS NIC meeting so we'll take a wait and see posture on this issue.

Some people don't know (or have forgotten) that we have a rapid response plan. Should we ask the director to include it during his introductory comments at the start of each academic year?