Description
Thanks to a collaboration between the provincial Geological Service, the Universities of Padua and Genoa, and AD.EL, a company specialising in electronics and telecommunications, Trentino has equipped itself with a dense network of accelerometers (more than 70) installed inside built-up areas. These are low-cost instruments (MEMS) designed to record ground shaking during strong seismic events (with a magnitude greater than 4). Unlike the other instruments in the seismic monitoring network, MEMS accelerometers make it possible to assess directly, just a few minutes after the earthquake, what the effects were on the ground (in built-up areas and infrastructure areas).
The seismologists of the Department of Environmental, Earth and Life Sciences of the University of Genoa have developed, together with the staff of the Geological Service, an automatic procedure capable of processing this data and sending a synthetic alert message to the provincial Civil Protection contacts, the purpose of which is to inform them in a very short time about the intensity of the phenomenon and the involvement of the resident population, so that they can intervene effectively and promptly in the areas most affected by the earthquake.