AVALON, Calif. (KABC) – The U.S. Geological Survey reported a magnitude 4.0 near Catalina Island on Friday morning, but later found that the quake never actually happened.
The USGS initially reported the quake at 9:48 a.m., saying its epicenter was about 18 miles south-southwest of the island community of Avalon and 44 miles south of San Pedro.
However, there was no earthquake. About an hour or so after the initial report, the USGS’s ShakeAlert system said it had actually “discovered a non-earthquake event” that triggered the system.
Hello everyone – #ShakeAlert has discovered a non-earthquake event that triggered our system. Fortunately, no public signals were sent. This is a little for the first time for us, because these events happen so rarely. We apologize for any confusion from our previous tweets.
– USGS ShakeAlert (@USGS_ShakeAlert) April 15, 2022
It was not immediately clear what event could trigger the system to register a magnitude 4.0 earthquake.
An engineer from Caltech told Eyewitness News that it is possible that something like a significant surfing noise was caused by the event, which is not an earthquake, but it remains unknown what exactly it was. The engineer also said that the event was marked as “fake”, but somehow went through the system.
The event algorithm was also different from the usual earthquake or early warning system algorithm, according to Caltech.
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