A magnitude 4.2 earthquake shook the North Bay early Thursday morning shortly after midnight, waking up people across the region.
The quake, centered in a rural area five miles east of Cloverdale in Sonoma County, was the second-largest earthquake anywhere in the 9-county San Francisco Bay Area in the past 12 months.
The only one larger in the region since over the last year was a 4.3 quake that shook Berkeley in September. That quake broke some windows in Berkeley and rattled products off the shelves in some stores. BART officials slowed trains temporarily to inspect tracks but found no damage.
There were no reports of damage, however, in Thursday’s Cloverdale quake, authorities said. It hit 21 seconds after midnight, with an epicenter 1.8 miles underground, in a sparsely populated area of ranches and oak woodlands.
“I didn’t feel it,” said Jonathan Alvarez, a firefighter with the Cloverdale Fire Protection District. “I was sleeping. Sometimes when my dog jumps up on the bed, it feels like an earthquake. But that wasn’t the case last night.”
Online maps showed that people reported feeling the quake as far south as Santa Rosa and as far north as Ukiah in Mendocino County.
The quake occurred on the Maacama Fault, an area considered the northern part of the Hayward Fault system, said Sarah Minson, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Minson said that USGS modeling shows there is a 2% chance of a quake larger than 4.0 occurring on the same fault system in the next week.
“Quakes of this size generally aren’t damaging,” she said. “But they can be unnerving.”
The quake appears to be unrelated to a swarm of small earthquakes that has occurred in recent months at the Geysers, an area of geothermal energy production along the eastern Sonoma and western Lake County border, she said.
The last major earthquake in the Bay Area was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 disaster that struck on Oct. 17, 1989, in the Santa Cruz Mountains along the San Andreas fault system. It killed 62 people and caused $6 billion in damage throughout the Bay Area, with collapsed buildings and freeways.
The most recent significant damaging earthquake in the Bay Area was the 6.0 South Napa Quake on Aug. 24, 2014, which killed 1 person, injured 300 and caused $1 billion in damage in Napa and Vallejo.
There is currently about a 72% probability of one or more magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquakes within 30 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Although Thursday’s quake apparently caused no significant damage, it was a hot topic on social media for people living in the affected area.
“We felt it on Jefferson Street in Cloverdale,” Vickie Johnson wrote on Facebook. “It shook our bed really hard.”
“I was in my yard in my truck sleeper,” replied Darrell Burke. “Felt like somebody jumped up on the side of the truck and started shaking.”
Multiple people reported being notified on the Shake Alert system through their cell phones.
“Several seconds of nice rockin’ and rollin’ up here on Cobb Mountain,” posted Bethann Eli on Facebook.
“Slight shake here in Hidden Valley,” replied Cher Hays. “Explains why my cat was zipping around crazy right beforehand, her eyes like large saucers. I think she might be a a better alert than the app!”
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