The ShakeAlert computer system that warns about the imminent arrival of shaking from earthquakes sent out a false alarm Thursday morning for a magnitude 5.9 temblor in Carson City, Nev., that did not actually happen.<\/p>\n
The ShakeAlert blared on both the MyShake app and the Wireless Emergency Alert system \u2014 similar to an Amber Alert \u2014 on phones across the region, including in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento area, and in eastern California, just after 8 a.m.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t immediately clear why the ShakeAlert system was activated, or how many phones got the incorrect alerts. The earthquake report was later deleted from the MyShake app \u2014 which carries earthquake early warnings from the U.S. Geological Survey\u2019s ShakeAlert system \u2014 and from the USGS earthquake website. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe did not detect any earthquakes,\u201d said Paul Caruso, a USGS geophysicist, Thursday morning. <\/p>\n
Potential explanations for the false alarm include problems with earthquake sensors or the algorithm used to calculate the warnings, officials said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re in the process of figuring out what happened,\u201d said Robert de Groot, an operations team leader for the U.S. Geological Survey\u2019s ShakeAlert system. <\/p>\n
The ShakeAlert system has previously proved effective<\/a> in giving seconds of warning ahead of expected shaking coming from significant earthquakes, including from a magnitude 5.2 earthquake in San Diego County in April; earthquakes in El Sereno and the Malibu<\/a> area last year; and a temblor east<\/a> of San Jos\u00e9 in 2022. <\/p>\n This is the first time the ShakeAlert system has issued an early warning for an earthquake that didn\u2019t actually happen, said Angie Lux, a project scientist with the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. <\/p>\n There have been other times when an earthquake early warning or test message has misfired. <\/p>\n In 2023, a scheduled drill<\/a> of the MyShake app woke up Californians at 3:19 a.m. because the warning was inadvertently scheduled for 10:19 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, instead of Pacific time. <\/p>\n And in 2021, phone users across Northern California got a warning of a magnitude 6 earthquake in Truckee<\/a>, near Lake Tahoe; but the quake was actually a far more modest magnitude 4.7. Scientists said the significant overestimation of the quake\u2019s magnitude was in part caused by it being on the edge of the ShakeAlert seismic network sensors, and that researchers worked<\/a> on reprogramming the computer system to avoid a similar issue in the future. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ShakeAlert computer system that warns about the imminent arrival of shaking from earthquakes sent out a false…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":424946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[9761,1582,276,44517,198010,198007,2961,224,5337,68572,198008,27951,2331,68571,198006,198011,198009,24066,10828],"class_list":{"0":"post-424945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-a-m","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-earthquake","12":"tag-earthquake-early-warning","13":"tag-false-alarm","14":"tag-la","15":"tag-los-angeles","16":"tag-losangeles","17":"tag-magnitude","18":"tag-myshake-app","19":"tag-northern-california","20":"tag-phone","21":"tag-quake","22":"tag-shakealert","23":"tag-shakealert-computer-system","24":"tag-temblor","25":"tag-u-s-geological-survey","26":"tag-warning"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115663397677941282","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}