An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.0 rattled the California-Nevada border Thursday afternoon, with its impact reportedly felt hundreds of miles away.
Its epicenter was four miles west-southwest of Walker, a California town of fewer than 900 residents. The tremor is the largest quake to hit a system of faults south of Lake Tahoe since 1994. Regionally, “this would be the largest one in almost two and a half decades,” according to Graham Kent, director of the University of Nevada, Reno’s seismological lab. “It’s 5.9 and some change — to the average person, it’s a magnitude 6.0.”
Though originally reported as at least two separate earthquakes, the false report came from an automatic systems error, said Seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones on Twitter. The USGS revised the report, removing one reported quake a few miles south of Stockton in central California, according to Yahoo News.