A 4.5 magnitude earthquake that struck near Carson City, Nev., on Friday night caused minor damages across the city, authorities confirmed.
Some damage to items on shelves inside stores was reported and one building shut off its gas as a precaution, Carson City Sheriff Ken Furlong said.
The temblor, originally reported as a magnitude 5, was pinpointed near the Indian Hills, a rocky outcrop south of the city, said Ken Smith, seismic network manager for the University of Nevada, Reno’s Nevada Seismological Lab.
“The earthquake is in an area that has experienced earthquake swarm behavior, on-and-off, for several years,” said Ken Smith, seismic network manager at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno. “There have been about two dozen ongoing small aftershocks which is expected for an event of this size.”
It is unclear if the earthquake is related to the nearby Genoa Fault, one of the largest faults in the region that separates Carson City and Lake Tahoe.
“We don’t want an earthquake along a major fault here,” Smith said, adding that it last ruptured 600 years ago.
Scientists record up to 15,000 earthquakes a year in Nevada, the third-most seismically active state in the nation, a smaller number than what actually occur, Smith said.
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