A powerful earthquake Monday shook fishing villages along Mexico's Gulf of California and prompted alarm as far away as Tucson and Phoenix, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
The U.S. National Earthquake Information Center said the 6.9-magnitude quake struck at 10:59 a.m. Tucson time and was centered 75 miles north-northeast of Santa Isabel in Baja California and 330 miles southeast of the border city of Tijuana.
Brian Smith, an academic adviser at the University of Arizona's College of Science, said he and his co-workers felt the shaking in their offices on the 10th floor of the Gould-Simpson Building on campus.
"I thought, 'Whoa, it's shaking and moving up here,' " Smith said. "The water in my glass was moving, and the coat hanger on the door started banging back and forth."
George Zandt, a UA professor of geosciences, said Tucson hardly ever feels earthquakes, making this a very unusual event.
People are also reading…
"It was a pretty good-size earthquake and was about 230 miles away, which is close enough to produce some shaking in the Tucson area," Zandt said.
Zandt, however, pointed out that he did not feel a thing.
"I didn't feel it," he said. "How I heard about it was people on the 10th floor telling me that they felt it. I didn't feel it at all."
It was the strongest of four quakes of 5.0-magnitude or greater that struck the area over a 45-minute period late Monday morning.
Phoenix Fire Department spokesman Alex Rangel said a high-rise near downtown shook violently enough that workers evacuated the building, but there were no reports of injuries or damage. The quake was centered about 460 miles from Phoenix.
Rangel said there were no damage or injury reports related to the quake.
Wilfredo Rivera, a manager at the Posada Santa Gemma hotel in Bahia Kino, Sonora, on the coast, said doors slammed as the ground rocked.
"The earth was turning around really ugly," he said. "People got really scared."
The quake was also felt in San Diego, where city employees left an 18-story downtown tower that houses the City Attorney's Office and other departments.
"Employees heard and felt some shaking and rattling," said Darren Pudgil, a spokesman for Mayor Jerry Sanders. "I'm told 40 to 50 people left the building but have since returned."
Gina Coburn, a spokeswoman for the City Attorney's Office, sought safety in a doorway of her 16th-floor office and thought briefly about leaving the building.
"I felt it a lot," she said. "The building was swaying back and forth. I didn't know if I should go down the stairs."
Officials in the two Mexican states on either side of the quake — Baja California and Sonora — said there were no reports of damage or injury.
The quakes were all centered in the middle of the Gulf of California, the narrow slice of sea between the Baja Peninsula and Mexico's mainland, which reduced its chances of causing major damage, said Don Blakeman, an analyst at the earthquake center.
Earthquakes around 7.0 magnitude are common in the region, according to the center, including a 7.6-magnitude quake that hit the coast of Colima state in 2003.
Seismologist Debi Kilb at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego said the series of quakes started with a 5.8 pre-shock followed quickly by a 6.9 temblor. She said two aftershocks came about half an hour later.
Kilb said it wasn't surprising that the quakes didn't cause damage. They were in the water, far from major cities, she said.
U.S. authorities said there was no tsunami threat to Hawaii or the U.S. Pacific coast. The Gulf of California coast was put on alert for large waves, said Alfredo Escobedo, director of the Baja California civil protection service.
