{"id":248475,"date":"2026-04-02T13:58:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T13:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/248475\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T13:58:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T13:58:10","slug":"earthquake-jolts-several-sections-of-santa-cruz-county-and-bay-area-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/248475\/","title":{"rendered":"Earthquake jolts several sections of Santa Cruz County and Bay Area"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOULDER CREEK \u2014 An earthquake early Thursday centered in Santa Cruz County rattled numerous communities, including the Bay Area and Monterey Bay regions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.<\/p>\n

The quake, at 1:41 a.m., had a magnitude of 4.6, the Geological Survey reported on its website. The epicenter was just east of Boulder Creek, in Santa Cruz County.<\/p>\n

\"U.S.U.S. Geological Survey map of an earthquake in Santa Cruz County on April 2, 2026. The long line near the epicenter is the San Andreas Fault.\u00a0(USGS)<\/p>\n

Reports received by this news organization indicated the quake was felt in the San Jose, Santa Cruz and East Bay areas. The USGS received reports that people felt it as far away as Sacramento, Santa Rosa, the Central Valley and King City in Monterey County.<\/p>\n

The San Andreas Fault is the major geological feature that\u2019s nearest to the quake, a U.S. Geological Survey map shows.<\/p>\n

The quake\u2019s depth was 6.8 miles below the Earth\u2019s surface, the USGS estimated.<\/p>\n

The agency\u2019s database said it was the largest quake centered in Santa Cruz County since April 18, 1990, when a pair of quakes recorded at 5.1 and 5.4 shook the county\u2019s southern tip, east of Watsonville. It was also bigger than any Bay Area quake since a 5.1 near Mount Hamilton<\/a> in October 2022.<\/p>\n

Public safety officers were observed Thursday morning in Boulder Creek assessing any possible damage.<\/p>\n

No goods appeared to be knocked off the shelves at a hardware store and supermarket in Boulder Creek, this news organization\u2019s direct observations showed.<\/p>\n

But the earthquake rattled a region rocked hard by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 that killed some 60 people across the Bay Area, most of them in a collapsed double-deck stretch of Interstate 880 in Oakland, but also three in downtown Santa Cruz\u2019s Pacific Garden Mall, where the shaking toppled buildings.<\/p>\n

That earthquake, more than 36 years ago, was on the minds of many early Thursday morning in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where residents awakened by strong shaking in the middle of the night posted to neighborhood social media groups.<\/p>\n

\u201cWow,\u201d said Amber Bonner in an early morning post. \u201cI\u2019ve never run to my children faster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bay Area News Group staffers John Woolfolk, Shomik Mukherjee, Julia Sulek and Sarah Dussault contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BOULDER CREEK \u2014 An earthquake early Thursday centered in Santa Cruz County rattled numerous communities, including the Bay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[389,184,7,8,1531,138,11330,7626,2949,332,110806,181,100,143,88,90,89,198,1498,3234,200,398],"class_list":["post-248475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-alameda-county","tag-bay-area","tag-california","tag-california-news","tag-crashes-and-disasters","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-disaster","tag-dublin","tag-earthquake","tag-east-bay","tag-felton","tag-latest-headlines","tag-news","tag-oakland","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-santa-clara-county","tag-santa-cruz","tag-santa-cruz-county","tag-south-bay","tag-tri-valley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}