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Ferndale and the adjacent towns of Fortuna and Rio Dell appeared hardest hit, with damage including water main breaks and about two dozen homes “red-tagged” because they were too unstable to be safely inhabited, state emergency services officials said.
“The shaking was really intense,” said Daniel Holsapple, 33, a resident of nearby Arcata, who recounted grabbing his pet cat and running outside after he was jostled awake in pitch darkness by the motion of the house and an emergency alert from his cellphone.
“There was no seeing what was going on. It was just the sensation and that general low rumbling sound of the foundation of the whole house vibrating,” he said.
Janet Calderon, 32, who lives in the adjacent town of Eureka, said she was already awake and noticed her two cats seemed agitated moments before the quake struck, shaking her second-flood bedroom “really hard”.
“Everything on my desk fell over,” she said.
California’s earthquake early warning system appeared to have worked, sending electronic alerts to the mobile devices of about 3 million northern California residents 10 seconds before the first rumbles were felt, said state emergency chief Mark Ghilarducci.
While earthquakes producing noticeable shaking are routine in California, tremors at a magnitude 6.4 are less common and potentially dangerous, capable of causing partial building collapses or shifting structures off their foundations.
Tuesday’s temblor struck in a seismically active area where several tectonic plates converge on the sea floor about 2 miles offshore, an area that has produced about 40 quakes in the 6.0 to 7.0 range over the past century, said Cynthia Pridmore, a senior geologist for the California Geological Survey.
“So it is not unusual to have earthquakes of this size in this region,” she told a news conference.
Shaking from Tuesday’s quake, which occurred at the relatively shallow depth of 17.9km was felt as far away as the San Francisco Bay area, the United States Geological Survey reported. The biggest aftershock registered a magnitude 4.6.
About 79,000 homes and businesses were without power in Ferndale and surrounding Humboldt County shortly after the quake, according to the electric grid tracking website PowerOutage.us.
PG&E crews were out assessing the utility’s gas and electric system for any damage and hazards, which could take several days, company spokesperson Karly Hernandez said.
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