Author: Grace Li
1:57 AM, San Jose
Just 15 minutes ago, a magnitude 4.9 earthquake hit the San Francisco Bay Area, 1 mile away from Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains. Even from San Francisco and San Jose, residents could feel their beds shaking as they were woken by the shifting of tectonic plates.
“My bed was shaking a lot,” one resident in San Jose states. “I woke up and was really scared to feel the ground shaking and my houses’s earthquake detector going off.”
The United States Geological Survey, or USGS, predicts a 60% chance of a magnitude 3+ aftershock to occur within the next week, and a 14% chance of a magnitude 4+ aftershock. Today’s earthquake was identified as the potential mainshock of an earthquake sequence, including another earthquake just yesterday, 9 km north of Boulder Creek.
Earthquake magnitudes are measured by the Richter scale, which has magnitudes from 1-9.9. A 4.9 magnitude earthquake is considered light by the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) Scale, which measures earthquake intensity rather than magnitude. This MMI description is characterized by noticeable shaking of indoor objects, and the earthquake is felt by most people in the affected area. It generally causes zero to minimal damage.
The Megaphone 