5.1 earthquake rattles San Francisco Bay Area

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake rattled the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday, shaking buildings and marking the strongest quake the region has seen in eight years.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake struck at 11:42 a.m. local time about 12 miles east of San Jose at a depth of about 4 miles. The area is about 40 miles southeast of downtown San Francisco.

The earthquake was the largest the Bay Area had experienced in years, according to USGS data and seismologist Lucy Jones. The last notable quake was a 6.0 magnitude earthquake that struck near Napa in 2014.

Jones told KNTV-TV the quake happened on the Calaveras fault, one of eight major faults in the Bay Area and a branch of the San Andreas fault line.

“The Calaveras fault is one that tends to have smaller earthquakes,” Jones said.

The National Weather Service’s Bay Area office said shaking could be felt at its Monterey office. Trains for BART and Caltrain briefly paused operation before resuming at reduced speeds, the agencies tweeted.

Santa Cruz County said on Twitter that there were no significant reports of damage following the quake. There was no damage to schools and classes safely resumed, according to the county.

Nearly 100,000 people reported receiving a warning before the shaking started through California’s earthquake early warning system, according to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, or Cal OES.

“Advance notice varied from two seconds for those very near the epicenter to 18 seconds for those in San Francisco,” the agency said.

Rich Constantine, the mayor of Morgan Hill, a city next to San Jose, said he was in the kitchen of his home when the “long and steady” quake struck.

“We had a frame in the house fall, everything was shaking but once it stopped, there was no damage,” he said.

A 3.1 aftershock followed about 5 minutes after the initial earthquake, USGS said.

Tuesday’s earthquake came just a week after the 33rd anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — a magnitude 6.9 quake that struck in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Oct. 17, 1989, just as the World Series was about to begin in San Francisco. The quake resulted in 62 deaths and caused billions of dollars in damage.

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