SFGate, by Amy Graff: A magnitude 5.1 earthquake was felt widely across California’s greater San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday, rattling homes and shaking windows.
The quake hit at 11:42 a.m. with a depth of 4 miles, just south of Mount Hamilton in the hills about 12 miles east of downtown San Jose, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A magnitude 2.9 aftershock struck shortly after at 11:47 a.m. in the same area, followed by a magnitude 3.6 aftershock at 3:08 p.m.
“There’s a 1 in 100 chance of an aftershock greater than magnitude 5 in the next day,” Annemarie Baltay, a research geophysicist with the USGS, said in a video about the quake on Twitter. “There could be 10 to 15 aftershocks of magnitude 3 or greater in the next week. Aftershocks of this magnitude and duration are totally normal for an event of this type.”
Tuesday’s shaker was the biggest earthquake the Bay Area has seen since the Napa quake in 2014, said Richard Allen, director of UC Berkeley’s Seismology Lab. The magnitude 6 earthquake struck the North Bay, damaging buildings in downtown Napa and Vallejo and injuring more than 100 people.
Allen said that with a magnitude 5, no damage is expected in the Bay Area, while with a 6, damage is typically localized, and with a 7 magnitude quake, damage is widespread across the region.
There were no damage reports on Tuesday as of 3:30 p.m. The San Jose Fire Department said at 12:13 p.m. that it had not received any emergency calls related to the temblor. More than 18,000 people reported on the USGS website that they felt the quake, with reports coming from as far north as Fairfield, as far east as Stockton and as far south as King City, the USGS said.
“Yep we felt that earthquake here at the office in Monterey,” the National Weather Service’s office in Monterey shared on Twitter.
BART said it was holding trains for five minutes and would be doing inspections. “Expect major delays system wide while we follow our safety procedures,” BART said.
The USGS said the tremor struck on the Calaveras Fault. The last time the fault, which runs through the hills east of San Jose, saw a significant quake was in 2007 when a magnitude 5.5 hit near Alum Rock on Halloween.
“When we think about hazardous faults in the Bay Area, there are three primary faults, San Andreas, Hayward-Rodgers Creek and Calaveras,” Allen said. “Calaveras is one of the big three.”
The USGS sent out a ShakeAlert, and many people reported receiving a notice on their phones warning them that a quake was coming just a few seconds before the tremor hit.
“Clearly a lot of people got the alert,” Allen said. “That was a great demonstration of the early warning system.”
Prophetic Link:
“God went through the proud land of Egypt as He will go through the earth in the last days. With fire and tempest, earthquake and death, the great I AM redeemed His people.” Christ’s Object Lessons, page 286.4.