A powerful and deadly earthquake struck the coastal California city of Santa Barbara back on June 29, 1925. More than a dozen people died and $8 million in damage was reported in the historic quake, which had a magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter Scale.
Flash-forward almost 92 years and a quake with the same magnitude and with the same epicenter was reported by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on Wednesday.
Only this latest event was a false alarm -- a database aftershock to be more precise -- of the 1925 event.
The USGS sent out the alert about a 6.8-magnitude tremor near Santa Barbara on Wednesday afternoon -- but turns out it was a false alarm.
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The alert went out with a date in the future: June 29, 2025. That's 100 years to the day after the Santa Barbara quake.
It went out on Wednesday because of a database error, the USGS said. The USGS quickly explained what had happened, citing a software issue encountered while revising data about the 1925 earthquake. The changes prompted the system to send an alert as if the quake had just struck.
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The non-quake is reminiscent of a National Weather Service flood warning malfunction in 2014 that made it look like a biblical flood was going to hit the eastern U.S. That wasn't the case, either.
Even if the USGS' mistake was only up for about 30 minutes today, it looked like a large and real quake had shook the area -- and strangely no one felt it. It also illustrated how connected news organizations and Twitter users in California are to the USGS, given the state's vulnerability to earthquake hazards.
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The Southern California faux-quake came only a few hours after a (real) noontime earthquake up north in the Bay Area. That was a true quake, but a small one with a magnitude of just magnitude 3.0. But that one people actually felt, and the USGS correctly reported.
