Geowatch Issue 41

2009 G8 Summit was held from 8th to 10th July in L’Aquila, Italy. The city was hit by a destructive earthquake in April 2009 resulting with hundreds of casualties and much more injuries as well as a huge economical impact. As expected after the main shock, the region was hit by several aftershocks of lower magnitude (> 4) alarming the population and the authorities, as well as presenting a clear danger due to the not fully destructed and unstable structures.

The Italian Department of Civil Protection has deemed appropriate to give realtime information about any seismic activity to the G8 delegations on large displays. CND (Controlli non Distruttivi) installed the GeoSIG seismic instrumentation in 5 selected buildings, to respond to the elevated awareness on the seismic activity in the region and the associated risks.

The instrumentation consisted of the state of the art equipment GMS-18 utilising wireless data communication and time and trigger synchronisation, with a high data resolution and sophisticated system integration, specially constructed for this important project. Two wireless seismic measuring systems were installed on the roof of each building and one on the ground floor. These three measuring systems were connected together via Wireless LAN and the acquired data were sent to the GeoDAS software located in the central server in Rome via satellite, GSM or telephone modem. From the central server in Rome the data of a single building was sent to a computer located in the building and processed with GeoDAS.

Large monitors displaying the measured building vibrations in near realtime were installed at the main entrance of each delegation building as shown in the pictures.

Figure 1. Installed displays at the main entrance of the buildings in L’Aquila (Italy) during the G8 Summit

GeoSIG participated in the 8th SINUG meeting, which took place in Litchfield Park, Arizona, 16 thru 18 June. We presented Measuring Solutions for Nuclear Industry.

During past years, we gained excellent experience with the seismic instrumentation of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) in several countries, including three plants in Switzerland, which are equipped with the modern Seismic Monitoring Systems manufactured by GeoSIG. We offer two different topologies of such systems - centralized and decentralized, and customized measuring solutions allowing for specific requirements of any NPP and for a cost optimization.

In April 2009 in Pennsylvania (Susquehanna) three such systems were supplied to USA. The project is done in GeoDAS software.

Thus GeoSIG has made one more step in improving our seismic monitoring systems and we are looking cooperation with Nuclear Logistics strategic partner of GeoSIG in USA for the NPP market. The main system replaces outdated seismic equipment of the Susquehanna NPP in Pennsylvania.

We offered centralised recording, which made it possible to utilise existing cables and, hence, significantly reduce the cost of installation. Two other systems are intended for training and one of them is designed to support simulation of an impact caused by earthquake and the following data processing, which can be stopped at any stage, analysed in details and continued again.

Automated data processing, analysis and reporting in these systems are based on the time-proved solutions realised in forward to the new NPP projects.