Magnitude-6.5 quake strikes off coast of Humboldt County
HUMBOLDT COUNTY, Calif. (KGO) -- A magnitude-6.5 earthquake struck off the coast of Humboldt County Thursday morning, followed by aftershocks.
For the most part, the aftershocks have been insignificant. There have been no reports of damage or injuries.
Bay Area earthquake tracker here.
The USGS sent out a tweet confirming the quake, roughly 100 miles out in the ocean, west of Ferndale.
Ferndale residents were rocked after the quake, which hit 97 miles off the coast along the Mendocino Fault Line.
"Well, I was cooking for a customer, and we got a big jolt and he goes earthquake and I said, 'Yeah, it's a good one.' And I was next to the sink and I had it full of dishes and you could hear the dishes at the bottom of the sink clink together, clink, clink, clink, clink,, and the floor was rolling," Poppa Joe's Café employee Patricia Galbraith said.
Meanwhile, Doug Brower was delivering pie across Ferndale's 100-year-old bridge and said this, "I'm constantly on that bridge behind big vehicles and stuff and I've never felt it shake like that before," he said.
As chance would have it, it's a small city, with just over 1,300 residents and Ferndale's police chief happened to be having breakfast at the Ferndale Pie Company.
"I thought someone was pulling on my chair from behind, I turned around and looked over my shoulder, no one there. With the roll of the earthquake, we were all kind of looking around," Ferndale Police Chief Bret Smith said.
Ferndale is no stranger to big quakes. A major quake in 1992 destroyed 80 percent of downtown buildings and the nearby Eureka earthquake six years ago was also a 6.5 like Thursday's quake, but there was widespread damage.
"Remember in 2010, as a matter of fact I thought somebody had run into my house. And then it continued to shake, some pretty significant shaking, paused, and then some more shaking. This one was more kind of a steady roll," Smith said.
People reported feeling it as far south as Aptos and Santa Cruz.
