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 2

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