False report of 5.9 magnitude earthquake alarms Nevadans
(NYT) — 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 website and said it had been sent in error.
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, Nevada, and nearby Reno began to report that they had felt no shaking.
The warning was released by a USGS tool called ShakeAlert that is designed to inform people about earthquakes before they feel shaking. It was the first time the system had botched an alert since it started warning the public in October 2019, said Robert de Groot, the operations team lead for the ShakeAlert system.
De Groot said USGS officials did not yet know what had caused the false alert. But he said that at least four earthquake-detecting stations in Nevada had reported shaking, which triggered the alert at 8:06 local time.
At least four sensors must detect shaking to trigger an alert from the USGS, de Groot said.
But after the alert Thursday morning, staff members at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory quickly looked at their instruments, “and there was nothing there,” said Graham Kent, a seismologist and director emeritus of the lab. Not only that, he said, “we were all close enough, we would have just have felt it.”
“There has been a lot of successful reporting using the ShakeAlert system in the last few years, so we’re headed in the right direction,” Kent said. “This isn’t a good look.”
Trump returns Coast Guard helicopter to town after uproar
(NYT) — The Trump administration has reversed plans to remove a U.S. Coast Guard rescue helicopter from a fishing and crabbing community in Oregon, lawmakers said Thursday, after facing uproar from worried residents and a temporary restraining order by a federal judge.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., posted on social media that he had spoken with Coast Guard officials and that they had returned the helicopter to the Pacific Coast town, Newport, “and promised to keep it there.”
Some residents thought that the helicopter was removed to make way for Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations there. It is unclear whether the helicopter’s return means federal officials may still place an ICE facility in the central coast town.
Newport sits where the Yaquina River meets the Pacific Ocean, and the estuary and nearby shorelines are known for dangerous king tides, sneaker waves and storm surges. Crossing the Yaquina Bay bar to reach commercial crab and fishing grounds by boat can be a perilous sprint through high waves and rapidly shifting channels.
The helicopter was placed in Newport after a 1985 maritime disaster, when a boat capsized and three crew members died before rescuers could arrive. Residents in Newport fought its removal in 2014, and ensuing federal policy banned the helicopter’s relocation without a lengthy public process.
But in October, Newport residents noticed that the helicopter was gone — it had been moved to North Bend, Oregon, 95 miles down the coast. They argued for its return at packed town halls and sued the federal government.