Large SoCal Earthquake Alert Erroneously Sent By USGS

BOMBAY BEACH, CA — The United States Geological Survey erroneously sent out an alert for a magnitude 4.6 earthquake in the Salton Sea Friday that never happened.

The USGS report included details about the epicenter, the depth and how widespread the impact was. It was pulled down from the agency's website after Patch and several media outlets reported the earthquake based upon the USGS alert.

On Friday afternoon, a Patch reporter interviewed businesses in the Salton Sea's Bombay area, who did not feel any shaking but would have felt intense impact if a magnitude 4.6. quake struck in the Salton Sea.

"I didn't feel a quake," said a clerk at Freddy's Mercantile in the Bombay Bay area. "That would've rattled the shelves."

The earthquake never occurred, acknowledged USGS Public Affairs Specialist Paul Laustsen of the Moffett Field Earthquake Science Center.

"The message was sent in error during a system testing," he said.“There was no earthquake of that magnitude at that time or at that depth. We are still looking into what happened. This is definitely a rare occurrence.”

The USGS Latest Earthquakes program is designed to get accurate information out to the public as quickly as possible, according to Laustsen.

"Typically, the data comes in from our seismometers and is done automatically by our system. Then, a human comes in and verifies the accuracy of the magnitude.”

In this case, the earthquake posting was removed from the Latest Earthquakes page, which is also rare, he said.

The USGS was one of several federal agencies gutted in February by the Trump Administration's sudden mass layoffs. The bulk of the phone numbers listed for West Coast public affairs staffers on the USGS website were no longer in service Friday. The chaos within the agency continued this week when the House Natural Resources Committee Democrats published a list of dozens of USGS offices slated for closure.

House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-CA) criticized the abrupt closure of 34 USGS field offices especially because of their role in monitoring earthquake activity. "Many USGS locations need to be field-based to do important monitoring for things like earthquake and volcano activity," he said.

USGS's original report said the magnitude 4.6 earthquake struck with an epicenter near Bombay Beach, in the Salton Sea area of California, in Imperial County, shortly before 10:30 a.m. The agency reported a depth of almost 5 miles below the surface and had an epicenter of 14 kilometers south, southeast of Bombay Beach.