Earthquake jolts Santa Cruz County and Bay Area

BOULDER CREEK, Calif. — An earthquake early Thursday centered in Santa Cruz County rattled numerous communities, including the Bay Area and Monterey Bay regions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake, at 1:41 a.m. Pacific time, had a magnitude of 4.6, the Geological Survey reported on its website. The epicenter was just east of Boulder Creek, in Santa Cruz County.

Reports received by this news organization indicated the quake was felt in the San Jose, Santa Cruz and East Bay areas. The USGS received reports that people felt it as far away as Sacramento, Santa Rosa, the Central Valley and King City in Monterey County.

The San Andreas Fault is the major geological feature that’s nearest to the quake, a U.S. Geological Survey map shows.

The quake’s depth was 6.8 miles below the Earth’s surface, the USGS estimated.

The agency’s database said it was the largest quake centered in Santa Cruz County since April 18, 1990, when a pair of quakes recorded at 5.1 and 5.4 shook the county’s southern tip, east of Watsonville. It was also bigger than any Bay Area quake since a 5.1 near Mount Hamilton in October 2022.

Public safety officers were observed Thursday morning in Boulder Creek assessing any possible damage.

No goods appeared to be knocked off the shelves at a hardware store and supermarket in Boulder Creek, this news organization’s direct observations showed.

But the earthquake rattled a region rocked hard by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 that killed some 60 people across the Bay Area, most of them in a collapsed double-deck stretch of Interstate 880 in Oakland, but also three in downtown Santa Cruz’s Pacific Garden Mall, where the shaking toppled buildings.

That earthquake, more than 36 years ago, was on the minds of many early Thursday morning in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where residents awakened by strong shaking in the middle of the night posted to neighborhood social media groups.

“Wow,” said Amber Bonner in an early morning post. “I’ve never run to my children faster.”

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—Bay Area News Group staffers John Woolfolk, Shomik Mukherjee, Julia Sulek and Sarah Dussault contributed to this report.