Makers of Quake Alarm Are Off to Shaky Start

David Elliot is alarmed.

And not just because he has an unusual battery-operated horn attached to his West Hills home that is designed to scream a loud warning if an earthquake is coming.

He’s worried because he has another 7,000 of them stored in a Santa Monica warehouse. And nothing--not last year’s Northridge earthquake, not last month’s Japanese temblor, not the new predictions that Los Angeles is closer than earlier believed to a major quake--seems able to shake loose any interest in them.

Elliot is co-inventor of a low-cost earthquake alarm that some claim can give as much as a 30-second warning before an earthquake is about to strike. That’s enough time, they say, for schoolchildren to duck under their desks or for adults to dash to the safety of a doorway.

Trouble is, few buy it.

“People don’t think it can work,” said Elliot, 43. “They’ve always heard that you can’t predict earthquakes, and that’s true. But this doesn’t predict them--it tells you one has occurred and it’s coming your way.”

He and co-inventor Ken Caillat of Thousand Oaks figured they had come up with a winner six years ago when they got patents for the alarm, hired workers to assemble them and put them on the market for $29.95 each.

The battery-operated alarm--called California QuakeAwake--operates on the principle that earthquakes generate two distinct seismic movements, said Caillat, 48.

The first is the P, or primary wave, a fast-moving but relatively gentle vibration. It is followed by the S, or secondary wave. Sometimes called the shear wave, it is the more powerful and destructive of the two.

A pair of mercury switches in the alarm are set to react to the P wave, Caillat said. When vibration causes either of the switches to close a circuit between a 9-volt battery and a 90-decibel horn, an ear-piercing beep results.

How much advance warning the alarm gives depends on how far away the earthquake’s epicenter is, according to seismologists, who say the concept behind the alarm is a valid one.

Scientists calculate that a P wave from a temblor 100 miles away will be felt 20 seconds before the S wave hits. But if the epicenter is only 10 miles away, the P wave arrives only about two seconds early.

“It has the potential to work,” seismologist Lucy Jones of the U.S. Geological Survey said of the alarm.

“But if you get five seconds of warning, you’re at least 25 miles away from the epicenter. How much damage do you see 25 miles away? South-Central L.A. got four seconds . . . that’s about as far out as we saw any damage from Northridge.”

Unfortunately for Elliot and Caillat, both of them live too close to the Northridge epicenter to have gotten an early warning worth bragging about.

Neither, apparently, did anyone else in the Los Angeles area who had one of the triangle-shaped alarms at 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994.

That means the pair have to reach as far back as the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, and to people such as Joyce Brewer, for testimonials.

The 62-year-old homemaker from Fairfax, 17 miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge, figures she got at least a 15-second warning after the Loma Prieta temblor struck 70 miles away.

“My son-in-law had put it on the wall for us,” Brewer recalled last week. “At the time, I didn’t really want it.”

Brewer was walking across the room to “shut the darn thing off” when her house started swaying and creaking. She said she made a quick detour to the safety of a doorway.

In West Los Angeles, preschool operator Pat Fountain is also a believer. Five of the alarms were installed at her Palms Tiny Tots school six years ago when one of Elliot’s two sons was enrolled there.

The alarms sent children scurrying in 1990 and 1991 and last year during a Northridge aftershock, Fountain said.

“There’s enough warning that the children can move, sometimes maybe 15 seconds,” she said.

Several public schools in Agoura--about 10 miles west of the Northridge epicenter--also have alarms. They were placed there in 1991 after parent Carla Beach lobbied officials to acquire them.

Teachers and students at Brookside Elementary School were jolted three days after the Northridge quake when an aftershock caused four alarms to begin beeping, said Principal Linda Vranesh.

“They’d never gone off before,” Vranesh said. “They went off just seconds before the shaking came--it was almost simultaneous.” Impressed, the school’s disaster preparedness committee is considering buying more.

The earthquake alarm wasn’t a selling point when it came time for Beach to put her home on the market before she recently moved to Pennsylvania.

“We thought it was chimes from the doorbell or a smoke detector,” said Eric Foumberg, who bought the home.

That kind of reaction doesn’t surprise Elliot and Caillat. Theirs has been a bumpy ride since they hatched the alarm idea shortly after the 1987 Whittier earthquake and quit their rock ‘n’ roll jobs to pursue it.

Elliot was a merchandiser who sold souvenirs at rock music concerts. Caillat was a record producer for the group Fleetwood Mac. Elliot was asleep in a cliff-side guest house behind Caillat’s Malibu home the morning of a 5.4-magnitude Whittier aftershock.

“Everybody was laughing that I slept right through it,” Elliot recalls. “I didn’t think it was funny--the house could have slid right down the cliff. I told Ken he was good with his hands, that he should come up with something that would wake me up if there was ever another one.”

The pair discovered P waves and S waves when they went to Caltech to read up on earthquakes. They returned there later and hired Caltech workers to test alarm prototypes on one of the school’s quake simulators.

Both men were soon working full-time on the alarm. They borrowed money from family and friends.

Finally, they paid to have 50,000 produced at a manufacturing plant in Mexico and recruited a network of distributors. Arrangements were made to sell the alarms at stores such as National Lumber, Sharper Image and Fedco.

The pair began working on a cheaper second version--and they settled back waiting to get rich. But it turned out that earthquake alarms are a tough sell in earthquake country.

More investors were eventually brought in to raise money for advertising. But some broadcast and print outlets were leery of running ads because of rules against products claiming to “predict” earthquakes.

Thousands of the alarms were eventually sold in California in the early 1990s. Thousands more were marketed in Mexico and in Missouri, where a case of earthquake jitters had broken out amid warnings that the New Madrid Fault there was due for a big temblor. Then the QuakeAwake seemed to drop from sight.

“I’ve had people tell me they don’t want to know an earthquake’s coming,” said Darren C. Smith, a Mission Viejo real estate investor who is the last of 50 QuakeAwake distributors.

“I’ve had a lot of people say they wouldn’t take one if it was free,” Smith said.