US Installing Quake Sensors in Northern Mexico

Next time the ground shakes in Mexico, the Department of Defense and the US Geological Survey want to know about it. The agencies are spending $500,000 to install earthquake monitoring machines in Mexican border regions, the Los Angeles Times reports. Officials say they don't want a repeat of the confusion after last year's Mexicali earthquake, when hours went by before they knew where the quake's epicenter was and where aftershocks were headed.

"We basically have a big blind spot to the south—unless we can get data from the Mexican network. So that allows us to expand our ability to see what's going on," the coordinator for the Southern California Seismic Network says. "Without instrumentation, how do you know what's gone on? All you know is, gosh, something bad happened in Mexicali." The Mexican government is spending $50 million on a separate upgrade of its own system. (More Mexico stories.)