A U.S. Geological Survey alert system sent out an alert Thursday for a 5.9 earthquake in Nevada that didn’t actually occur.
The fake earthquake was located near Carson City and Reno, near the state’s western border with California. Alerts were delivered to people in areas that would have been affected at 8:06 a.m., the Geological Survey said, but it was a false alarm.
“We are currently looking into why the alerts were issued. We’ll provide more information when we learn more,” the agency said. The webpage made for the fake quake reads: “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.”
According to MyShake, an app that distributes U.S. Geological Survey alerts, Thursday’s fake quake was the first false alarm suffered by the agency’s ShakeAlert system, which has sent out more than 170 alerts for earthquakes since 2019.
Since the alerts are automated, human error was not involved, the system’s designers said.
“Nobody dropped the ball,” ShakeAlert Operations Team Lead Robert de Groot told The New York Times.
