. >> reporter: reggie harrison is long beach's deputy city manager in charge of disaster preparedness if we get a warning, seconds or tens of seconds of warning, we have to give information to the gas department where they take an opportunity to turn off gas, an opportunity to drop cover and hold or giving the crane operator at the port an opportunity to get down from the crane. >> reporter: shake alert is being developed by a team of scientists from the usgs and several west coast universities including here at the california institute of technology. >> so what we have here is what we typically have installed in the field. >> reporter: elizabeth cochran is one of those working on the new system at usgs. >> we have about 500 sensors throughout the state which are contributing data and that number continues to grow as we install new sensors or upgrade sensors. >> reporter: the sensors send back data in realtime to the servers on campus which use sophisticated algorithms to analyze the information in less than a second and send out alerts. those alerts which range from a few seconds to