An alert that Nevada had been rocked by a 5.9-magnitude earthquake early Thursday sent phones buzzing briefly before the U.S. Geological Survey quickly deleted the warning from its web page and said it had been sent in error.
“The event did not occur, and has been deleted from USGS websites and data feeds. The USGS is working to understand the cause of the false alert,” the agency said.
The alert for what would have been one of the largest earthquakes in the United States this year set off a chain of automatic warnings as far away as the San Francisco Bay Area as people in Dayton, Nev., and nearby Reno began to report that they had felt no shaking.
It was unclear what prompted the false alert, which said the earthquake had occurred at 8:06 a.m. local time. Within minutes, some news outlets published stories detailing the earthquake’s reported location and strength, and fake images of destruction began spreading on social media.
Jon Bakkedahl, the Carson City emergency manager, said local officials were trying to figure out what had triggered the false alert, but had not heard anything from the U.S.G.S.
He said that regional emergency management officials had just sprung into action and were preparing to check buildings for damage when they learned from the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno, that there had been no actual earthquake.
“It was a false alert, and we’re trying to figure how and why?” Mr. Bakkedahl said in an interview. He added that once word went out that it was a false alarm, regional emergency managers were able to “quell everyone’s expectations and slow everything down.”
Erin McCann is the senior editor for The Times’s weather team. She is based in San Francisco.
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