GREENVILLE, Calif. — Residents in rural northeastern California assessed damage to their homes and businesses Friday from a magnitude-5.7 earthquake, one of the strongest temblors to hit the densely forested region in decades.
The quake centered near Greenville downed chimneys and sent items tumbling from grocery store shelves when it hit shortly before 9 p.m. Thursday. It also ruptured a tank that supplies residential drinking water, leaving 300 people under a boil advisory until further notice.
“Without question, it’s the strongest quake I’ve ever felt here,” Plumas County Sheriff Greg Hagwood said. “It was very unsettling, and it lasted long enough to create a measure of anxiety.”
Despite the damage, no injuries have been reported.
The earthquake was felt in Carson City, and as far away as San Francisco, 230 miles southwest; and in Oregon. About four dozen aftershocks have been reported, including a magnitude-4.9 temblor that struck early Friday.
Pacific Gas & Electric said about 660 customers lost power on the southwestern edge of Lake Almanor at about 9:30 p.m. Thursday. Electricity has since been restored.
At least three houses had moderate damage including collapsed chimneys and cracked plaster. County officials said the total damage isn’t yet known because many homes in the area are seasonal and unoccupied.
Hagwood added supermarkets and other stores “had a lot of things come off the shelves.”
Susan Shephard and her husband, Alan Shephard, who run the Quail Lodge at Lake Almanor near the epicenter, said they were watching “The Hunger Games” on TV when the whole building started shaking.
“All of a sudden things started falling off the shelves, mirrors fell off the wall, vases fell down to the floor, everything started crashing,” Susan Shephard told the Redding Record-Searchlight. “It felt like the end of our world.”
The epicenter was not far from High Desert State Prison in Susanville, but wardens reported no power outages or damages to the facility or its operations, said Jonathan Parsley, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The quake was the most powerful to hit the mostly wilderness region since 1934, said Keith Knudsen, deputy director of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park.
It appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault line similar to the San Andreas. More than 9,000 people including from neighboring states logged onto the USGS website to report feeling the jolt.
“It was a pretty good size quake,” Knudsen said.
The quake hit a rugged region where the Sierra and Cascade mountains meet. More than 100 lakes and 1,000 miles of rivers and streams flow through more than a million acres of national forest. About 22,000 people live in Plumas County.
The region’s seismicity is not well-studied because the terrain is rugged and dollars have been spent on analyzing faults in more populated corridors like the San Francisco Bay area where the earthquake risk is higher. Since Thursday’s quake, scientists are mulling putting more portable monitors near the epicenter.
