It’s been totally underplayed by local media, but last week on Friday, March 14, the United States Geological Survey sent out an alert for a magnitude 4.6 earthquake in the Salton Sea area.
The USGS report included details about the epicenter, the depth and how widespread the impact was.
The problem is that it never happened and the earthquake report was pulled down from the agency’s website.
USGS Public Affairs Specialist Paul Laustsen conceded the earthquake never occurred. He said:
“The message was sent in error during a system testing. There was no earthquake of that magnitude at that time or at that depth. We are still looking into what happened. This is definitely a rare occurrence.”
During Friday afternoon, local media reporters interviewed businesses in the Salton Sea’s Bombay area. They did not feel any shaking but would have felt intense impact if a magnitude 4.6. quake struck in the Salton Sea. A clerk at Freddy’s Mercantile in the Bombay Bay area said:
“I didn’t feel a quake. That would’ve rattled the shelves.”
Yet, in one of the clearest possible examples of how Trump / Musk’s slash and burn techniques to clear out the federal government, the gutting of NOAA and its member agencies and services, shows the dangerous and reckless myopia that governs at the top.
That PR person from USGS, Laustsen, told the local media that the agency’s Latest Earthquakes program is designed to get accurate information out to the public as quickly as possible. He said:
“Typically, the data comes in from our seismometers and is done automatically by our system. Then, a human comes in and verifies the accuracy of the magnitude.”
In this case, the earthquake posting was removed from the Latest Earthquakes page, which is also rare, he said.
There is a clear implication that in this case, no human came in and verified the accuracy of the alert. So, no staffer was available to verify an earthquake report. A 4.6 magnitude is not huge and many don’t cause damage. But in any case, a report went out about this one and it was not true. If this is the situation within the agency that is supposed to warn the public about impending hazards, nothing is guaranteed.
What if next time (tomorrow?) there’s not enough human staff to verify another report, and a huge one is mis-reported or not reported at all? This is unacceptable.
Patch reports:
The USGS was one of several federal agencies gutted in February by the Trump Administration’s sudden mass layoffs. The bulk of the phone numbers listed for West Coast public affairs staffers on the USGS website were no longer in service Friday. The chaos within the agency continued this week when the House Natural Resources Committee Democrats published a list of dozens of USGS offices slated for closure.
House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-CA) criticized the abrupt closure of 34 USGS field offices especially because of their role in monitoring earthquake activity. “Many USGS locations need to be field-based to do important monitoring for things like earthquake and volcano activity,” he said.
USGS’s original report said the magnitude 4.6 earthquake struck with an epicenter near Bombay Beach, in the Salton Sea area of California, in Imperial County, shortly before 10:30 a.m. The agency reported a depth of almost 5 miles below the surface and had an epicenter of 14 kilometers south, southeast of Bombay Beach.
Patch asks its readers, “Did you feel Friday morning’s earthquake? Shopkeepers in Bombay Beach did not.”
There may come a day when there’s no earthquake alert at all and the big one arrives and everybody feels it.
