Doctoral Dissertation Research: Seismic Politics: The Scientific Development of an Early Alert System Infrastructure in Mexico

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University of California at Irvine doctoral student, Elizabeth Reddy, supervised by Dr. William M. Maurer, will undertake research in Mexico City on the relationship between science and public safety. Mexico City, subject to frequent and powerful earthquakes, is host to an innovative earthquake early alert system. The Sistema Alerta Sismica (SAS) is comprised of a coordinated set of sensory devices and radio transmitters. These are connected to alert machines in hospitals, schools, media outlets, and sometimes even private homes. Beginning in 1991, when SAS sensory devices register significant earth motion, they automatically send signals to alert machines in Mexico City that, in turn, issue a loud warning, sometimes up to sixty seconds before an earthquake reaches the city. This warning, which depends on the relative speeds at which earthquakes and radio waves move, provides a valuable opportunity for people to take shelter. However, the sensory network and its alert system are severely limited in scope. Because the SAS can only provide alerts for certain earthquakes, it has been subject to a great deal of scientific and public debate. In the process of developing the SAS, maintaining it, and advocating for it, engineers and scientists must mobilize ideas about the social world as well as their technical expertise. This research is designed to explore how these groups navigate the rigorous and possibly conflicting demands of their expertise and imperatives of public safety: particularly how they engage with concepts relating to risk, how they account for particularly Mexican social and technical factors, and ways that institutional imperatives and policy mandates affect their work. As they knit together cutting-edge geophysical and engineering knowledge with public risk management, they undertake work that they themselves describe as challenging in the extreme. To gather the data necessary for this investigation, the researcher utilizes archival resources, participant observation, surveys, social network analysis, interviews, and oral histories. Her findings will speak to production of social politics of seismic risk in Mexico, and has implications for ongoing research on science in the public sphere.