QuakeSafe Earthquake Safety

Most of what saves people in an earthquake is decided before it happens. QuakeSafe is built around that: knowing what to do, having the things you need, and being able to find each other afterwards. KNOW WHAT TO DO, BEFORE YOU HAVE TO Step-by-step guidance for the situations you might actually be in — indoors, outdoors, in a vehicle, in a high-rise. Written to be read in seconds, with the life-saving steps marked, because nobody learns this while the room is moving. PRACTISE IT AS A HOUSEHOLD A 60-second drill you run together. Everyone taps when they are under cover, and the app records who took part. It reminds you again in three months, because a drill done once is a thing you did rather than a thing you know. A KIT THAT IS ACTUALLY READY A checklist of what an earthquake kit needs, and — the part people miss — tracking for what expires. Water, medicine and batteries all have dates. QuakeSafe tells you before they pass, not after, so the kit in the cupboard is still a kit. CHECK YOUR HOME AFTERWARDS A guided walkthrough for the hours after: gas lines, water pipes, structural cracks, electrics, and documenting damage for insurance while it is still there to photograph. ALERTS FOR EARTHQUAKES NEAR YOU Watches AFAD, EMSC and USGS together — EMSC aggregates the national networks, including Kandilli — and notifies you about quakes within 200 km, not every quake in the country. You choose the magnitude and the region, and the app limits how many alerts it sends in a day. THE SHORTEST WAY TO SAY "I'M SAFE" After a significant earthquake the app asks whether you are OK. One tap answers it, and your family sees it. If no answer comes it asks again after an hour and again after two, because the first minutes are not minutes anyone spends on a phone. YOUR FAMILY, ON ONE SCREEN See who has answered and who has not. Silence is shown as "asked, no answer yet" rather than "unknown" — those are not the same thing, and the difference is what tells you where to go first. WHEN THE NETWORK IS DOWN Phone networks fail in the hours after a large earthquake, from damage and from everyone calling at once. QuakeSafe can message other phones running it directly, over Bluetooth and peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, with no cell tower and no internet. The range is tens of metres in the open and much less through walls, and the app shows you who it can actually reach rather than implying more. ASSEMBLY POINTS Official emergency assembly areas near you. Our data currently covers the provinces affected by the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake; outside that area the app says it holds no data for your region rather than implying there are none. AFTERSHOCK FORECASTS After a large earthquake, how many aftershocks to expect and for how long — the question everyone asks and few apps answer honestly. Your background location is used for one thing: working out whether an earthquake happened near you. A single approximate position is stored and overwritten, no history is kept, and it is never shown to anyone else. Anything you deliberately share is separate — a location sent to your family, an aid request, a hazard report — and goes out only when you choose to send it.