 Every year, thousands of animals visit the Feralon Islands about 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco. But only a few scientists visit this protected wildlife sanctuary. Most are biologists, but these researchers aren't here for the birds or the marine mammals. So I'm Richard Allen, I'm the director of the UC Berkeley Seismology Lab. Allen is here with a team of engineers to see this. Okay, so this pile of rocks is the seismic station. It's one of nearly 200 such stations across the state of California that can detect earthquakes. It's also a critical part of the earthquake early warning system which sends alerts to the My Shake app. Developed by Allen and his team, it could help save lives and billions of dollars in damages. This instrument detects an earthquake. If it's one of the four instruments closest to the epicenter of the earthquake, it's used to locate the earthquake, estimate the magnitude of the earthquake, and then we send a warning out to people that people can get on their phone using the My Shake app. If you feel shaking or if you get a warning about shaking, you just drop, cover and hold on. In the Loma Prieta earthquake and in the Northridge earthquake, more than half of the injuries were because people either fell over or things fell on people. So if everybody drops, takes cover and holds on to something, then we could halve the number of injuries in future earthquakes. So that's the first reason is hazard reduction. The other reason is research. We need to understand earthquake processes. But to understand the earthquakes better, this station needs to be upgraded. And that means a lot of new equipment. And the only way to bring that all out efficiently is actually to fly it in on a helicopter. Thousands of pounds of gear are being delivered. Inside one crate is a brand new seismometer. So what type of sensor is this? This is a Strechheisen STS-5A. It will go... The Feralon Islands provide seismologists like Alan with crucial data about one of California's most famous and most dangerous faults. So the San Andreas Fault basically runs right down the western edge of California. We're all ready for a magnitude 7, a magnitude 8. We want to put out seismic instruments around the fault. And what's really important is having them on both sides of the fault. And so that's why a site like this on the west side of the fault and it allows us to look east onto the fault. And it's fairly unique. We don't have many sites, unfortunately, on this side of the fault. This is such a critical site. It was one of the first instruments that was put here when we started to build, when Berkeley started to build the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network. So there is the mouse, I saw it. Thanks to funding from the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, new racks of electronics will replace a system that has become home to invasive mice. And in this case, the mouse booth. This is our opportunity to really turn this into a state-of-the-art site where we have much lower noise levels and we can really detect all earthquakes that are occurring in the region. During a week that saw storms with 70 mile per hour winds and two-story waves, the teams set up the new sensors, ran cabling to the new rack, and hooked it all up to the antenna. Once the Feral On Station is calibrated and brought online, it will join a comprehensive sensor network across California. We've actually been rapidly expanding in order to support the early warning system, and we only have four stations left to build. Stations like the one on the Feral On Islands might give people a few seconds to prepare for the shock waves of an earthquake, but they can't predict them. Yeah, so we're not predicting earthquakes. We do not know how to predict earthquakes. What we do is we predict the shaking. What I mean by that is that when the earthquake, if we have a fault plane like this, the earthquakes typically occur at eight kilometers depth in California. So that an earthquake nucleates on the fault, the energy radiates out, and it's detected by instruments close by. And it's once these instruments have detected the earthquake, we can then predict the shaking that will occur further away from the site. So we detect it with the closest seismic stations, and then we predict the shaking that's coming further away. And so that means you typically get a few seconds, maybe a few tens of seconds of warning. Installing and maintaining this system isn't cheap. It costs $45 million a year, but that's money well spent, says Alan. I think it's a hugely valuable system. In the Northridge earthquake, it's estimated that there was two to three billion dollars of losses just due to the injuries. So if we can halve that number, then the entire system has paid for itself in just one earthquake. So I think it's really valuable. I think it's also valuable beyond just the early warning, in the sense that people are very interested in early warning. It makes people think about earthquakes. So we're more likely to have a preparedness kit. We're more likely to think about our homes and our offices and how safe they are to live and work in. And so I think it actually goes a long way to reducing the overall impact of earthquakes, not just because of the warnings, but because more people are thinking about the earthquake problem and looking to reduce the hazard.