Sept. 22 (UPI) — A magnitude 4.3 earthquake hit Berkeley, Calif., early Monday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey.
The quake, which struck at 2:56 a.m. PDT, initially had a magnitude of 4.6, and its epicenter was just a few blocks from the University of California, Berkeley campus. It’s depth was about 4.8 miles.
More than 21,000 people reported having felt it on the USGS site within the first hour. Berkeley and Oakland felt it the strongest, and San Francisco and Vallejo felt it slightly less. Reports from people in Salinas and Stockton said residents felt it there, too.
So far, there are no reports of injuries or damage.
USGS Seismologist Sarah Minson said this is what they consider a small earthquake even though it woke people up all over the Bay Area.
“Shaking is variable and it depends a lot on your location, what kind of building you’re in, what kind of land you’re standing on,” Minson told ABC7 News. “However, this being such a small magnitude earthquake, shaking from it is going to be pretty low everywhere, certainly enough to be impactful for people, for them to feel it, for it to be upsetting, potentially even to knock over things very close to the epicenter. But in general, we wouldn’t expect to see, for example, structural damage from an earthquake this small.”
The epicenter was near the Hayward Fault, which runs along the eastern side of the Berkeley campus and bisects its football stadium.
“UC Berkeley is the only major university in the world that has a dangerous earthquake fault running through its campus,” wrote Horst Rademacher, a researcher at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory in his 2017 walking tour of the Hayward Fault on the campus.