A 5.9 magnitude earthquake, strong enough to cause significant structural damage and landslides if usually limited in casualties inflicted, struck 12 miles outside of Nevada’s capital of Carson City at 8:06 PDT on Thursday morning, according to a USGS seismological alert system that fucked up and sent a bunch of automated alerts out while nobody in the area felt any shaking whatsoever.
“This was an errant earthquake warning sent out by the USGS’s ShakeAlert system,” Kyren Bogolub, seismologist at the University of Nevada, Reno Seismological Laboratory, told the Reno Gazette-Journal following the non-disaster that killed 0 and injured 0. “There was no earthquake. We are awaiting more information from the USGS. Thank you for your patience while we sort this out.”
It’s not clear how many QAnon freaks learned of the false alarm and then immediately concluded that it wasn’t the USGS alert system that malfunctioned, but the Deep State’s secret earthquake weaponry that was scheduled to be tested on Carson City at that exact moment. That being said, this is an awfully freaking weird glitch if it wasn’t some IT engineer simply forgetting to make sure that he/she was still in the test environment. You can’t just find a USGS seismograph out in the field and hit it with a shovel expecting it to trigger an earthquake alert. There are redundancies.