With his surfboard tucked under his arm, Alex Felton was about to walk a couple of blocks to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach on Thursday morning when his cellphone blared. “TSUNAMI WARNING!” an alert screamed. “You are in danger.”
A lifelong surfer, Mr. Felton, 31, has ridden 10-foot waves at Ocean Beach many times. He considered jumping into the ocean anyway, he acknowledged later. But texts from friends convinced him to follow the alert’s directions and move away from the coast, not toward it.
Which friends were worried that he might make a bad decision? “All of them,” he said with a grin.
Bay Area residents rode a metaphorical wave together on Thursday, after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake off the California coast shook the ground for hundreds of miles and prompted the National Weather Service to issue a tsunami warning for coastal counties in Northern California and southern Oregon.
First, blaring phone alerts scared the wits out of people across the region, their hearts pounding as they wondered what sort of disaster-movie-type scenario was about to occur. Then they calmed down and even laughed as the alert was called off about an hour later.
“It was a lot to take in, in the moment,” said Johnny Williams, who owns a bookstore in Berkeley. “It felt like a science fiction movie.”
The threat of a tsunami lurks vaguely in the minds of Bay Area residents — enough that San Francisco’s Java Beach Cafe serves a “Hot Tsunami” sandwich, layered with ham, salami and mortadella. But many people did not know quite what to do with the warning from their phones.
“I was frazzled,” said Ray Williams, a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, whose phone was set to “Do Not Disturb” but went off anyway. “I’ve lived here all my life, and there’s never been any type of tsunami. No warning. No threat.”
The waves were predicted to hit at 12:10 p.m. in San Francisco. Many people who were parked at the coast zipped inland, hoping to outrun waves that never came. The San Francisco Zoo, perched near the ocean, secured its animals and shut down.
Some schools kept their students inside to be safe, releasing children to parents who wanted to take them home.
There was another contingent, too: those who raced toward the coast in hopes of a show.
Sharon Pretti, 62, said her first thought after getting the jarring phone alert was, “I want to go down there.” And so she did, walking to Ocean Beach to check out the waves along with dozens of other curious onlookers.
When the alert was called off, she admitted that she felt a little disappointed. “I was hoping to see bigger waves,” she said. “I just adore the ocean.”
Down the coast at Fort Funston, in the city’s southwest corner, about 20 people stood on a wooden observation deck roughly 200 feet above the beach. A sign posted at the deck warned not about waves, but about the possibility that hang gliders would come barreling in, crashing into onlookers.
The waves did not materialize, and neither did the hang gliders.
Vince Powell, 61, rode his motorcycle there. “I saw some dolphins,” he said. “I talked to some interesting people.” There were worse ways to spend an hour.
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