California earthquake live: Tsunami warning cancelled after 7.0-magnitude quake hits

The U.S. Geological Survey reported the tremor, with a magnitude of 7.0, hit just over 60 miles to the west-southwest of Ferndale. There were more than 30 aftershocks after the initial quake.

Residents along the coast were urged to move to higher ground after the tsunami warning was issued by the National Weather Service for parts of the California and Oregon coasts.

The service has now canceled the tsunami warning. “No tsunami danger presently exists for this area,” the agency confirmed on social media.

Julia Musto and Rhian Lubin report.

Things began feeling strange for Sacramento man Gabriel Porras when a 7.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Northern California earlier today.

He noticed the quake when his sixth-floor office began shaking.

“You feel like you’re kind of rotating in a circle with these new buildings with the dampeners,” he told ABC 10. “You can stand still and kind of feel yourself wobbling around. It wasn’t anything too intense.”

Looking down to lower floors, he saw people self-evacuating from nearby buildings.

“There seemed to be a lot of commotion at the ground level,” he said.

As their phones blew up with disaster warnings, some Bay Area residents ran for the hills – while others faced death with a shrug. Io Dodds reports on the fear and the farce of the great tsunami that wasn’t

After a tsunami warning briefly put the city on edge, life in San Francisco is back to normal.

During a visit from one of our reporters to San Francisco’s Baker Beach on Thursday afternoon, the dogwalkers were walking, the fishermen were fishing, and there were few obvious signs there had been the chance of a one-two punch natural disaster on the horizon earlier in the day.

Residents across California and the Pacific Northwest were alarmed on Thursday with a tsunami warning after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake occured off the coast of Northern California.

The warning, however, was quickly dropped. So what happened?

Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci had a helpful explanation why for MyRadar Weather.

Thankfully, tsunami waves did not inundate the West Coast today.

If they had, communities in California might have had to deal with a worrying trend that cropped up in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene: politicized disaster aid.

When the storm barreled through, it was right before Election Day, and Republican officials like Donald Trump and JD Vance didn’t hesitate to spread false claims about the nature of the government’s disaster response.

Here’s reporting from Julia Musto and Kelly Rissman on this troubling phenomenon.

A series of smaller aftershocks are expected over the next week after today’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake off the coast of California.

More than a dozen have already been reported.

The aftershocks will weaken over time, though there’s still about a five percent chance of an earthquake greater than 6.0 in magnitude over the next week, Christine Goulet, the director of the USGS Earthquake Science Center, told NBC News.

“Following a 7, there could be fairly large aftershocks,” she said. “As time goes by, they’re going to be less frequent and smaller.”

“Several aftershocks have already occurred and will continue for the next week or so,” according to the Pacific Northwest Seisemic Network. “There is a 35% chance of one or more aftershocks that are larger than M5. There will likely be dozens to hundreds of smaller aftershocks within the next week in the magnitude 3 range.”

Authorities ended up calling off a tsunami warning for Northern California on Thursday after an offshore earthquake, but the circumstances still left an impact on Oakland resident Nuala Bishari.

She writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that Thursday’s scare prompted her family to drill down on the details of their plans for a natural disaster, like how to stay in touch and which supplies they should have on hand.

“We’re considering expensive, long-range walkie-talkies in case cell service goes down,” she wrote. “I found an old backpack I can use as a go bag. I’m shoving in passports and car titles as I write this.”

“There’s a lot to figure out. But as stressful as Thursday’s tsunami warning was, it was a wake-up call for all of us to be better prepared,” she added. “Next stop for me: the grocery store, to finally stock up on emergency food.”