California 6.4-Magnitude Quake: State of Emergency Declared for Humboldt County Transcript

Tonight, Governor Newsome declaring a state of emergency in Humboldt County after a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck overnight.

We were upstairs and we fell out of bed.

Houses rocked off their foundations and ripped open. Streets buckling.

It woke me up violently. Jumped out of bed. And just heard this roaring, stuff just flying off the shelves.

Officials reporting at least a dozen injuries and two deaths, a 72-year-old and an 83-year-old both suffering medical emergencies during the quake.

This is earthquake country. We do feel a lot of 3.5, 4.0 earthquakes. But to get a 6.4, it’s really significant.

Rio Dell is being called ground zero for damage. Water is out to the entire town and might be for days. 15 homes there have been red tagged as uninhabitable.

The glass doors broke off. Yeah. The hinges are right here.

Quite the experience. It felt like the wheels were falling off the truck it shook so hard.

I just remember walking out of the house and seeing our house basically on the ground and our porch higher than the house.

Jackie McIntosh told her husband she wanted to move after the last earthquake. Their house now likely a total loss.

The worst part of it was we had a showing today and someone was going to put an offer on our house.

The Eel River Bridge in Fernbridge shut down when the road gave way, closing the main road out of town.

It felt like I was in a tornado. My house is on post and piers, and it completely moved in circles. It was pretty terrifying.

he quake was centered off the coast. Seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones saying this was a rare result in that so much destruction was caused on land.

That is the boundary between Juan de Fuca and the Pacific Plate. It’s a very common source of magnitude, sixes and sevens. But offshore, so it’s rare that there’s much of any damage.

There have been at least 80 aftershocks, one reaching 4.6 on the Richter scale. At one point, more than 70% of Humboldt County was without power. Crews have now been working for nearly 24 hours, and many have since had their lights turned back on. But tens of thousands remain in the dark tonight, with temperatures dipping into the forties and rain moving in.

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