In a milestone, California’s new statewide earthquake early warning cellphone app sent out its first public alert for a magnitude 4.3 earthquake that ruptured Tuesday in the mountains between the Central Coast and San Joaquin Valley.
More than 40 people received the warning, said Jennifer Strauss, project manager for the MyShake app, which was created by UC Berkeley and released publicly in October. It is available on iOS and Android systems.
Because of the weak magnitude of Tuesday’s quake, the area in which shaking was felt was relatively small and close to the epicenter in the Cholame Valley, confined to just portions of San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Kings and Kern counties. There were no reports of damage.
The MyShake app relies on earthquake information calculated by the U.S. Geological Survey’s backbone ShakeAlert system, which gathers earthquake sensing data from a network of hundreds of ground sensors throughout the West Coast.
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