Morgan Hill
– A 3.4 magnitude earthquake hit South County Wednesday evening,
but no injuries or damage were reported.
The quake, centered five miles northeast of San Martin, struck
at 5:16pm.
Morgan Hill – A 3.4 magnitude earthquake hit South County Wednesday evening, but no injuries or damage were reported.
The quake, centered five miles northeast of San Martin, struck at 5:16pm.
Capt. Dave Ronco of the Santa Clara County Fire Department said his crew didn’t feel the quake at El Toro Station just off Monterey Road and south of Cochrane Road and had received no calls from residents.
“We didn’t even know about it,” Ronco said.
A Morgan Hill Police dispatcher said she received no calls asking for information or to report damage.
Thomas Flowers, working at BookSmart in downtown Morgan Hill – a 100-year-old wooden building that is normally sensitive to seismic events – said he felt nothing. And no books fell off the shelf, he added.
Forty-five minutes after the quake, the California Department of Forestry/South County Fire District knew of no damage. The agency checked its own fire stations for tremor damage and found none, a dispatcher said.
A single concerned citizen called CDF/South County from a cellular phone to ask if an earthquake had occurred, the dispatcher said.
No members of the public called Gilroy public safety dispatchers about the quake within the first 40 minutes, dispatcher Mary Anders said – “not even the normal, ‘Hi-did-we-just-have-an-earthquake?’-type calls.”
The dispatchers themselves felt the quake from their office at the Gilroy Police Department, Anders said. A microquake of 1.3 followed two minutes after the initial quake.
South County has seen its share of temblors.
On Feb. 2, 2004, a rash of small earthquakes shook the Gilroy and Morgan Hill area. The largest, registering a magnitude of 3.6. It was centered about two miles east/northeast of San Martin on the San Andreas fault.
Just before that sizable temblor, a smaller magnitude-2.3 quake shook Morgan Hill.
On May 6, a 2.9-magnitude “microearthquake,” centered in the hills south of Gilroy wasn’t even big enough to rattle china.
A second, smaller tremor – 1.4 on the Richter scale – took place from the same epicenter a short time later.
On April 24, 1984, a 6.2 earthquake centered just east of Morgan Hill caused major damage to the area. One house was destroyed, many damaged and several buildings downtown on Monterey Road had to be demolished. No one was killed.
