(NBBJ) - A local company thinks its new technology for isolating a room or a portion of it from violent earthquake motion enough to protect priceless ancient statues in a museum could also save tall tanks and stacks of barrels such as those that twisted, toppled and ruptured in the recent south Napa major shaker.

“We want to isolate the barrel room floor as a whole or in sections,” said Paul Segas, a co-founder of EQX Global (eqxglobal.net).

Mr. Segas and co-founder Don Clyde are working with university researchers, structural engineers and curators to be sure three recently unearthed 20-foot-tall sandstone statues dating to the third century that are part of an upcoming exhibit from Saudi Arabia are protected from tumbling in a temblor like the Aug. 24 Napa or 1989 Loma Prieta quakes. The foundation of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, which is hosting the “Roads of Arabia” exhibit set to run Oct. 24–Jan. 18, already was retrofitted using a method called base isolation. But the Smithsonian Institution, which is hosting the exhibit in the U.S. on behalf of the Commission for Tourism and Antiquities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, wanted each statues to be safe.

EQX’s patent-pending base-isolation technology basically works on the physics of friction and acceleration. A proprietary polymer applied to one of the two plates in each panel and the undulating design of the other plate lessens friction between two, allowing the plate to move around more an faster in a strong quake more than what’s sitting on it.