Expert: Remote Nevada Earthquakes Big Enough to Cause $1B in Damage

A trio of significant earthquakes that struck a remote part of western Nevada along the Sierra Mountains’ eastern last month were big enough to cause as much as $1 billion in damage if they had been centered beneath a big city, a leading expert said.

The first of two magnitude 5.7 quakes and a third that registered 5.5 resulted in no injuries or reports of significant damage. The epicenter was east of the Nevada-California line near rural Hawthorne about 100 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe and 90 miles south of Reno.

“Thankfully, it’s not underneath a big city because a sequence of 5.7s could certainly do a lot of damage,” said Graham Kent, director of the University of Nevada’s Seismological Laboratory.

“If you put this underneath Reno, we are probably looking at a $1 billion event, probably with some fatalities and many casualties,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s much better to be beneath a ranch 20 miles outside of Hawthorne.”

The biggest quakes were followed by a series of smaller aftershocks, including two in the magnitude 4 range and at least a dozen larger than magnitude 3.

Kent said it should serve as a reminder that Nevadans live in the third-most seismically active state in the nation behind California and Alaska.

“It’s another wake-up call,” said Kent, who said they have been studying the seismically active region around Hawthorne since a swarm of thousands of smaller earthquakes were recorded there over a two-month period in 2011.