Tag: earthquake

Just felt one of those earthquakes everybody's been talking about. It's the first one of this swarm that I've actually felt. It wasn't a big jolt, but enough to definitely let you know you were rocking and rolling. If I felt it that much in Carson City, it must have been quite a bit stronger in Reno. I'll have to find out what strength this one was.

Update: It was a magnitude 3.2, according to USGS. Weird that it was followed by a 3.0 just a couple of minutes later, and I didn't feel that one. Especially because I was still paranoid and waiting for another one.

Update: So I guess one thing about the USGS earthquake reports is that it takes them a few hours to dial them in. So while the website was only reporting a couple of magnitude 3 quakes last night, I wake up this morning to find a relatively beefy 4.7 squeezed in the middle there.

This is the biggest one yet out of this swarm. And the people in Reno sure felt it, a lot more than we did in Carson.

Reno has been getting peppered with earthquakes over the last few weeks. They've been small ones, most in the 1-2 range where you can't even feel them. So the story has only been about how many there have been, not how strong they were. But now they're starting to get stronger.

Just today so far there have been about 26 earthquakes, according to the USGS website. And these have been felt. The two big ones were a 4.1 and a 4.2, which is well in the range of what can be felt. Those came just before 4:00 today. Many reports have been coming into the RGJ, all of them talking about shaking desks, falling dishes, and the other details you get with a story about earthquakes. And the undercurrent to all the reports is one of concern: are the earthquakes going to keep getting worse?

Thanks to the Mark Englebretson postcard collection that I received recently, I discovered that I had a bunch of old pictures of downtown Wells, which was ravaged by the earthquake yesterday. I posted one of them yesterday, but here are a few more. Now, understand that this was back during the absolute heyday of Wells, when the railroad was the way most people would enter town, and these buildings are right next to the tracks and the station. Ever since I-80 was built on the other end of town, this block has been dying a gruesome death from neglect, and many of the buildings had been deserted for years and on the verge of falling down anyway. This commercial row was actually listed as #4 on the list of Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places put out by Preserve Nevada in 2006. So watching downtown Wells be destroyed by an earthquake is like seeing an old man in a nursing home get food poisoning. The method is unexpected, but you knew the end was near.

There are also a few new pictures of the destruction, like this gallery from the RGJ.

Photo from Marilyn Newton of the RGJ

That photo shows the backside of these buildings here, revealing the extent of the destruction.

Photo from RangerDanger! at Flickr

There's also a photo gallery online at the Nevada Appeal.

Wells, NV, got hit with a fairly big earthquake this morning, a 6.0 magnitude shaker. Early reports said that one or two buildings had been damaged, but as news organizations actually got out to the town to file first-hand reports, they found it was much worse than they had heard. The old downtown area, which consisted mostly of unreinforced brick buildings, is literally in a shambles. They say most of the buildings there will have to be torn down because they are beyond all hope of repair. Even the more modern buildings that make up the rest of the town sustained minor damage, like cracked walls, broken foundations, and toppled chimneys. The people of Wells are going to need a lot of strength to get through this one.

Photo from RangerDanger! at Flickr

Nevada is ripe for earthquakes, so it's actually a bit of a surprise that we don't have them more often. There have only been five or six really big ones like this in recent memory. But if you look around at all the mountain ranges that criss-cross the state, each one of those mountains has a major fault line at its base. Fault lines run along the whole Eagle Valley, the whole Carson Valley, all over Reno, and just about everywhere in between. And each of those fault lines is capable of the "Big One", a magnitude 7.0 or larger that can come at any time. So I think we're really lucky that big earthquakes like this are rare, but our luck can't last forever. One day, it might be 50 years, or a hundred, or five hundred, but a big quake will hit Carson City one day too. The best we can do is be prepared.

Pictures of the Wells quake can be seen at the Elko Daily Free Press