Above: the new monitoring station
By the Caribbean Journal staff
A new earthquake monitoring station in Antigua is almost complete, the government said this week.
A team from the Trinidad-based University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre in Trinidad will return to the island soon to complete the project, which is located in Bethesda.
The station will monitor earthquakes and feed data into the Caribbean Tsunami Warning System.
“The signal from this station will go directly to every warning system,” said Dr Richard Robertson, director of the UWI Seismic Research Centre. “It will come to us, will be accessible to all and will provide additional signals to determine whether these earthquakes could produce tsunamis because not every large magnitude earthquakes could produce tsunamis. They have specific characteristics that you want and you need stations like this to provide you with those characteristics to determine if you need to send out a warning or not.”
The station will have a “Ray Dome” enabling it to withstand hurricane-force winds.
The project is being funded by the European Union at a cost of around $100,000. It is a joint project between the UWI Seismic Research Centre, the government of Antigua and the French West Indies.
Similar stations are planned in Dominica and in Carriacou. A station has already been installed in St Lucia.