Willits earthquakes: what do they mean?

November 23, 2020 — Between August 19 and August 23, as the August Complex fire was working towards becoming the state’s largest wildfire, almost fifty earthquakes were measured eleven miles east southeast of Willits. The first one was a magnitude 4.2, and most of the aftershocks were tiny, with just four of them above a magnitude 3. Cynthia Pridmore is a senior engineering geologist at the California Geological Survey. She says Willits, like most of California, is really close to an active fault. Specifically the Maacamas, which is part of the Hayward Fault subsystem of the San Andreas. We’ll hear from Pridmore and Amanda Moyer, the Earthquake Early Warning program manager at CalOES, which has worked with the US Geological Survey and private industry to roll out three ways to give people a few seconds between the first and second waves of a quake to drop, cover and hold on.