“And then, as we were running out of the house … You could just smell gas everywhere,” she said. “Our water got knocked off, so there’s water everywhere. I just remember walking out of the house and seeing, like, a house basically on the ground, near our porch.”
Fellow Rio Dell resident Liz Peavy, 68, said she too was roused from sleep as her home began to rumble.
“And it just kept shaking and shaking, and things were crashing,” she recalled. “The TV was coming down, the microwave, everything, like all my little knickknacks were crashing everywhere.”
Fire officials said dispatchers fielded roughly 70 emergency calls after the quake.
Details of casualties were sketchy. The two fatalities involved individuals, one aged 72, the other 83, who suffered medical emergencies that coincided with the quake, preventing rescue teams from reaching them in time to render life-saving care, said Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal.
Most of the 12 survivors known to have sought medical care got themselves to hospitals and sustained relatively minor injuries, many from fallen objects. Two of the most serious cases were a head injury and a broken hip, officials said.
“REALLY INTENSE”
Police closed a bridge over the Eel River just outside Ferndale, a picturesque town notable for its gingerbread-style Victorian storefronts and homes, after four large cracks were discovered in the span. The California Highway Patrol also said the roadway foundation there was at risk of sliding.
Authorities reported at least four Humboldt County roads shut down due to earthquake damage.
“The shaking was really intense,” said Daniel Holsapple, 33, a resident of nearby Arcata, who recounted grabbing his pet cat and running outside after he was jostled awake in pitch darkness by the motion of the house and by an emergency alert from his cellphone.
“There was no seeing what was going on. It was just the sensation and that general low rumbling sound of the foundation of the whole house vibrating,” he said.
California’s earthquake early warning system sent electronic alerts to the mobile devices of about 3 million northern California residents 10 seconds before the first shaking was even felt, said state emergency chief Mark Ghilarducci.
While earthquakes are routine in California, tremors at a magnitude 6.4 are less common and potentially dangerous.
Tuesday’s temblor struck in a seismically active area where several tectonic plates converge on the sea floor about 2 miles offshore, an area that has produced about 40 quakes in the 6.0 to 7.0 range over the past century, said Cynthia Pridmore, a senior geologist for the California Geological Survey.
“It is not unusual to have earthquakes of this size in this region,” she told a news conference.
Shaking from Tuesday’s quake was felt as far away as the San Francisco Bay area, the United States Geological Survey reported. The biggest aftershock registered a magnitude 4.6.
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