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Magnitude 6.0 Quake Hits Northern California, Causing Injuries and Outages
As numerous sources report, an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 struck California early Sunday morning, with an epicenter about 9 miles south of Napa. According to the San Francisco Chronicle's account, Some power lines down in western Contra Costa County, but Bay Area bridges appeared to be fine, according to the California Highway Patrol. There were widespread reports of power outages, gas leaks and flooding in the North Bay, with at least 15,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers without power in Vallejo, Napa, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa and Sonoma. Police reminded motorists to stop at darkened intersections. ... In Benicia, several miles from the epicenter, the quake was strong enough to knock pictures off mantles.
Bay Area bridges appear to have survived the quake -- significant, in that the L.A. Times reports that USGS estimates peg it as "the largest earthquake to strike the Bay Area since the Loma Prieta temblor of 1989," and says that injury reports (especially from glass) are streaming in from the area around Napa. The Times also has a larger estimate of customers suffering power outages: "more than 42,000" around the northern Bay Area. Unsurprisingly, social media channels are full of pictures showing some of the damage.
For those in California, did you feel the quake? (And from how far away?) Update: 08/24 13:15 GMT by T : Also in earthquake news: an even stronger quake (magnitude 6.4) on Saturday struck central Chile, shaking Santiago -- nearly 70 miles from the epicenter -- for more than half a minute, but with "no immediate reports of fatalities or serious damage."
For those in California, did you feel the quake? (And from how far away?) Update: 08/24 13:15 GMT by T : Also in earthquake news: an even stronger quake (magnitude 6.4) on Saturday struck central Chile, shaking Santiago -- nearly 70 miles from the epicenter -- for more than half a minute, but with "no immediate reports of fatalities or serious damage."
Lake Merritt here (uptown Oakland)... Wasn't very strong. We were thinking it felt like a 3 from here. Enough to get us moving and worried, but not enough to knock anything over.
It was strong enough to wake us up, but not enough to do any damage in Sunnyvale.
Considering this happened before and was stronger, shouldnt this be here 1st?
Clearly the people of Chile didnt have the time to take pictures and update their twitter pages, so its not newsworthy?
I hope it's not a foreshock.
It woke me up.
IMO a 6.0 in the Bay Area should go down almost unnoticed (like it does in prepared countries like Japan), instead of creating outages, floods, etc...
Join the Quake catcher network of Stanford. You can order a sensor, but your laptop can detect them too.
http://qcn.stanford.edu/
The detected earthquake
http://qcn.stanford.edu/earthq...
Bert
Since it might take a few hours before the complete outcome is clear, USGS does make automated prediction of casualties and damages, based on earthquake magnitude, location and population in the area. The result in this case is most likely no casualties, with a small chance for up to 10 people killed, and a most likely damage of somewhere between 100M$ and 1B$.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
I am currently working in Santiago and did feel last nights shaking. It is not the first I have felt in the last year but it is definately the strongest. I haven't heard of any problems in Santiago but Valpariso is much closer and a portion of the city was recently damaged in a large fire so this might complicate the recovery efforts there.
I Don't Work Here
A long, rolling temblor pegged at 6.0 by the U.S. Geological Survey shook a wide swath of the Bay Area awake early Sunday, causing damage to buildings and sending at least 70 people to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
Centered about nine miles south of wine country's Napa at 3:20 a.m., the quake was felt as far south as Santa Cruz and into Sonoma County. It was the largest earthquake to strike the Bay Area since the Loma Prieta temblor of 1989, the USGS said.
A little more than two hours after the quake, a shallow magnitude 3.6 tremor was reported by the USGS. The aftershock occurred at 5:47 a.m. at a depth of 5.0 miles.
Residents reported power outages in Napa and beyond, and fire departments in several counties, along with the California Highway Patrol, were on the lookout for damage to bridges. There were reports of gas leaks, downed power lines and at least one fire. Pictures flooding in from Twitter show damage within homes.
Napa County Fire Department confirms they are swamped with calls, including reports of injuries. It is unclear how severe the injuries are because units are still responding.
A spokeswoman at Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa said most of its injured 70 patients had cuts, bumps and bruises. Many are being treated and released, but some have been admitted.
According to PG&E, more than 42,000 customers are without power across the northern Bay Area, including American Canyon, Napa, Saint Helena, Santa Rosa and Sonoma, according to an outage map.
A medium 5+ quake in Iceland near the Bárðarbunga Volcano, which is under half a kilometre of ice
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear...
It felt strong here, woke everyone up and we got the kids away from windows. This 1920s house may amplify things. Going to see if the cracks in the walls have grown.
I didn't feel the earthquake in San Jose, which is further south than Sunnyvale. The real fun begins when the East Coast media starts running stories about how California is sliding into the ocean. CNN once did a story about a minor 3.0 quake in Los Angeles by showing a grocery store surveillance tape with nothing falling off the shelves as the camera shook from being mounted on the wall. Most Californians don't even notice quake unless its 5.0 or higher.
Down in the city I woke up to feeling the quake, but honestly it didn't feel very severe so I went back to sleep.
I can only please one person a day. Today is not your day, and tomorrow does not look good either.
It's strange . . . we're worried about dying from Global Warming . . . getting hit by an asteroid . . . an Ebola epidemic . . . but nobody seems concerned that maybe the Earth could bust apart at its seems.
I, for one, would welcome the end of the Earth in some weird way that we never thought about.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I noticed a bit of shaking, but nothing fell off the shelves, and it was over in about twenty seconds or so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Didn't even get woke up near Discovery Bay. Probably a shdaow effect of Mt. Diablo's mass...
Family member up in Pinole had some light damage. Things knocked out of cabinets, and ceramic planter pots sitting on concrete broken.
I woke up a few minutes before and was just getting back to sleep when it happened. It was a long quake, a good 15 second at least. The room shook side to side with a rough swaying. I started slow (like a big truck driving by the house), ramped up really quickly, held that for most of the time, then damped out.
All Lego displays remained intact.
I wonder how the wineries made out. I toured a few of them a couple of years ago. At one place, they had their barrels stacked and kept from rolling only with wooden wedges tapped into place between them. I asked the guide if that was a problem during earthquakes. His response was, "We never get earthquakes here."
Have gnu, will travel.
Woke my wife and I up, large rolling motions, audible shaking but nothing fell down. Enough to get our attention, for sure! Funny thing is, first thing we did after everything stopped (we ran to our sons' room and stayed there for a few minutes, it didn't wake them up) and we knew that was the bulk of it, was to grab our cell phones. Wife went on Facebook for reports from people in the area, and I downloaded an Earthquake app. Funny how Facebook is the first place most people went to read about it.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I live about 50 miles northwest. I woke up feeling like I was rolling right-left (basically east-west) in bed. After waiting about a minute, I got up and checked the inside of the house, nothing dislodged or damaged.
I don't know, I hear that Zeus is a heavy user of Google maps for pinpointing lighting bolt strikes.
Not sure about all the other gods, however.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I woke up to go pee, felt the earth shaking as I was walking to the door, went pee, went back to bed, and I hoped the epicenter was fairly close, because otherwise a lot of people were going to have a bad night.
It was not a big earthquake by any means, but I see it did some real damage near the epicenter up in American Canyon.
. . . if you're close enough to the epicenter. It is enough to rattle the china. It's all about the inverse square law. There are small Earthquakes in California all the time, but most of them are too far away. California's crust is too fractured to transmit earthquake energy very far.
There's no link in the summary, and I'm not going to bother hunting down TFA.
The bridges surviving a 6.0 is hardly noteworthy; 6.0 just isn't that big a quake by local standards.
The only thing that can be inferred from this being the "largest since Loma Prieta" is that is has been eerily quiet since then. It makes sense, that let a lot of stress out of the local fault systems, but when I was growing up, you didn't even talk about a 5.0.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
I'm in Northern Contra Costa county about 12 miles from the epicenter and felt it strongly here. The shaking lasted about 11 seconds and was pretty intense.
No damage here, as we have everything secured and the house is designed to withstand a much larger quake.
. . . but nobody seems concerned that maybe the Earth could bust apart at its seems.
Seams okay to me.
San Rafael, CA here. Woke my girlfriend and me up, a few things in my workshop fell off, everything is fine. Checking on people further north right now.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
"Why do Californians think they can "feel" the strength of a quake? It's complete nonsense because you cannot feel its distance."
It's not nonsense at all. Bigger quakes last longer. The duration of the shaking is a good measure of the actual strength, and can be read directly off the seismographs, while more accurate estimates take a while to compute from these and other measurements.
That's why you see initial estimates as "duration magnitude", later revised to "moment magnitude" which more accurately measures the energy from measurements of the distortion of the underground structures due to the stress changes. You'll notice that it's SO good that the adjustment is usually only a couple tenths of a scale point - less than a 2:1 difference in energy.
The rip starts at some point along the fault and propagates along it in fits and starts, much slower than the compression and shear waves from the individual releases, as the motion from the relaxing stresses in the section that let go increases stresses in the next section. This keeps up until the effect reaches a point where the stress isn't enough (at the time) to make it let go. (You get aftershocks when the more gradual readjustments add "straw to the camel's back" and get it going again - or start one on another nearby section or another nearby fault.)
The strength of the wave decays with distance. But the duration increases as the wave takes multiple paths, scattering off underground structure. So a distant earthquake doesn't "feel" shorter than a nearby one. Longer-but-weaker. Also, the P wave propagates much faster than the S wave, is weaker, and doesn't "stretch out in time" much at all. Time separation is greater with distance. They feel very different. (Mnemonic: First the P wave makes you pee, then the S wave ...) So with enough experience one could ballpark both the strength and the distance from the feel of the quake.
For instance: Loma Prieta, a 7.1 moment magnitude (6.9 early duration magnitude estimates), propagated along aobut 22 miles of fault. It lasted 8 seconds, though as you got farther away the shaking got up to 45 seconds before it became too weak to be noticed. I was standing in front of Palo Alto City Hall when it got there, and my perception was first (P wave) "a truck is going over this overpass - wait', I'm not ON an overpass", then (S wave) "being in an airplane experiencing 15 seconds of mild turbulence." (Most ground-bound constructions {except for mobile and modular homes, which are built to be shipped on highways}, weren't built to withstand "15 seconds of mild turbulence". B-b ) I was listening to a San Francisco radio station: Seconds after the shaking started, the announcers got in two sentences (first about feeling an earthquake (P wave), then that it felt big (start of S wave)) before the transmitter failed (a bit into the S wave) - and the shaking was far from over.
The scale is logarithmic base 10, so a 1 point difference in scale is a 10x difference in energy, and thus time. This makes it EASY to guess the magnitude (if your sense of time doesn't distort to much from the excitement). A 6.1 would be 1/10th the energy of Loma P., so also about 1/10th the time, and Nappa to Oakland is comparable to Loma Prieta to Palo Alto, so call it a second and a half of the strong shaking.
On the other hand, for the first quake I felt after moving to CA I was nearly on top of a small one. (I think it was a high 2.x or a low 3.x.) Very sharp single shock - like a car hitting a concrete building while you're inside - followed by "echoes" as the wave moves on rapidly and EVERY building makes the sound of being hit (followed by a chorus of car alarms - shock sensors were common then). Sensation: Being in an elevator when it hit a misaligned section of the guide track. Three-stage perceptual distortion, as I realized that I was standing on the ground and my brain momentarily remapped my mo
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We're worried about 90% of life on Earth becoming unsustainable as a result of global warming.
No we're not - we have fossil records from, e.g. the Jurassic where high temperatures and CO2 at about 1300ppm resulted in mega- flora and fauna all around the earth, even in areas that have desertified as the Earth's moisture has become locked up in Antarctic ice sheets over the past several hundred years of cooling (as evidenced by ancient Chinese maps).
What "we" are worried about is the rich cultural and political elite losing their seaside mansions and other shore-line real estate investments. Because we can find seashells 15' underground 20 miles inland from them and we know that the Earth's climate oscillates on several timescales, it's inevitable that the Earth will return to those prior conditions at some point in time.
But if we can slow down the encroachment of the sea on the banksters' wealth at all, then it's worth any cost to be borne by the 99%.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What "we" are worried about is the rich cultural and political elite losing their seaside mansions ...
Well said, sir. (I already commented in the article so couldn't mod that up. I had to settle for "friend"ing you. B-) )
Also: In the spirit of "Never letting a crisis go to waste", it's also an opportunity for the 1% to incrase their power over the 99%, and find ways to rip them off. (Carbon taxes. Government mandated carbon credit exchange schemes, with markets provided, and billions in transaction fees raked in, by "entrepenuers" like Al Gore and Barak Obama.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We slept through it. Wouldn't have know it happened if not for the news.
Cheers, Tim -- Tim Janke Part mad scientist, part lion tamer: sr. software engineer, global team leader, project mana
I'm sorry, you probably couldn't hear my laughing at your comment over the sound of all the tornadoes and hurricanes....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The quake was in Napa, which most people don't consider to be the Bay Area. Yes, it's nearby, but it's not really the Bay Area.
When the headlines read "Massive Quake Hits Bay Area!", most people will think of places like San Francisco and Oakland. According to Google Maps, Oakland to Napa County Airport (near the epicenter) is 37 miles and my guess is 30 miles in a straight line.
See that map here: http://www.google.org/publical...
In my part of Oakland, it was big enough to wake me up, but nothing rattled or hit the floor.
Napa got hammered, but the Bay Area just got its dishes rattled.
I saw a bunch of panic on social media this morning, from people out of the area. All they saw was "Bay Area Earthquake" in the media.
You're kidding, right?
Just after people's terror of word-ending asteroids wore off, the media was pushing the Yellowstone Supervolcano (very hard) as the thing we should all be pissing our pants about. And they really never gave-up on it, either:
http://www.inquisitr.com/10848...
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/30/...
http://news.nationalgeographic...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt04...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No, most life on earth will survive any reasonable global warming scenario. Civilization surviving is much less certain. So while it wouldn't directly kill us, it might result, indirectly, in 90% of humanity dying. Not, repeat, *not* 90% of life on Earth...unless it resulted in all-out warfare between the mega-powers. All-out nuclear warfare could do that, I suppose.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The Yellowstone Supervolcano wouldn't split the Earth apart at its seams any more than any of the other reasonable scenarios would. Even the collision that created the moon didn't do that. It might, however, kill off most people in the North American continent. And solve global warming at the same time.
The thing is, there's no real way to predict when, or if, it will go off again. There's some magma filling chambers under it, which has some people worried, but nobody knows whether or not its really significant.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
A gigantic crater with lava flowing through it, will look an awful lot like something "split the Earth apart" to most people.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
People who live in brick houses with tile roofs in earthquake zones are just asking for trouble.
Are not that rare. They happen several times a month somewhere on the Earth. Seismicity is subject to selective attention. When quakes, most of them, occur far from population centers no one except geologists notices, and so ordinary people are apt to make false inferences about quakes that occur together in time. I am not saying that theire are no connections, only that the scientific claim requires some mechanism to link them.
I live on the San Francisco Peninsula and did feel the quake. The Initial compression wave (P-wave) woke me up and I felt and heard the 10 seconds of shaking with a very short long period wave coda. Others reported longer periods of rolling motion as different paths through the crust cause more attenuation of the high frequency energy from any distance, especially alluvial fill and wet sediments. That was a big effect of the 1989 quake which was closer to me and in the same basin, the San Francisco Bay pull-apart basin.
The effects up in Napa seemed totally anticipated, remember that most building up there did not fail, that it was old construction or poor construction, mobile home parks and car ports that had the worst damage. There is widespread damage, though, most of it repairable by degrees.
USGS has geologists in the field looking for evidence of ground rupture at the surface that would be associated with a mapped fault, probably the West Napa Fault, but the issue is two fold, the cracks in the ground may not be due directly to tectonic offsets, the geophysical solutions published five minutes after the quake on USGS' site suggest the right lateral strike-slip displacement common to the tectonics of the area; finding that offset on the surface as an expression of a mapped fault is not always found and the cracks that are seen may be due to secondary effects, slope failure and landsliding, not the primary displacements caused by tectonic motion. The quake hypocenter was at 10 Km depth, far deeper than to have been caused by water table effects, and the epicenter, the place above it on the surface, was 5 Km NW of American Canyon in deepening alluvium under San Francisco Bay. I don't think that the West Napa Fault has been mapped that far south. To the north, along the mountain side west of Napa the geologists may find the tell-tale strike-slip that prove the tectonics at the surface, and that the fault that moved was the West Napa Fault. On the other hand they might find evidence of a new fault, a branch or a fault with no surface expression.