Point Reyes Light - August 19, 1999
5.0 earthquake jolts Bolinas into spotlight
A moderate earthquake centered in Bolinas sent shockwaves through the Bay Area on Tuesday, doing minor damage in town and prompting residents there to gather in the streets.
The magnitude 5.0 earthquake struck at 6:06 p.m. on the San Andreas fault about four miles beneath Bolinas. The jolt was felt throughout West Marin and reportedly as far away as Sacramento and Santa Cruz. But Bolinas was rocked the hardest.
"It was really intense," said Charlie Ross, who was working behind the deli counter of the Bolinas General Store when the quake hit. He described the sensation as an upwards jolt, after which he dove under the sink as bottles and cans came tumbling from the shelves.
Across the street at Smiley's Schooner Saloon, beer bottles on display behind the bar held steady as several bottles toppled over in the cooler.
At the Bolinas Bay Bakery, a second-story stovepipe crashed to the ground, narrowly missing bakery workers Bob Wall and Kelly McDermott.
Down Wharf Road at the Coast Cafe, where workers were earthquake-proofing the wine collection, bottles that had been removed from the rack shattered on the floor while bottles in the rack were unharmed.
About 100 books fell from the library shelves, and all the artwork hanging in illustrator Keith Hansen's gallery went askew.
"All the art did a dance," said Hansen, who said the quake hit with a sharp upwards strike then reverberated a few seconds more. "I've felt all sorts of earthquakes but never felt one from below."
In the aftermath, townspeople gathered downtown to share their experiences as television crews and newspaper reporters rolled into town. Some residents claimed to have predicted the quake; others claimed responsibility.
Employees at the Bolinas People's Store told employees at Bolinas Bay Bakery next door that they suspected the bakery had blown something up.
Early news reports struggled to place Bolinas correctly on the map, variously siting it on Tomales Bay, south of San Francisco, and south of San Rafael. Eventually, news crews found their way onto Wharf Road and got a predictable razzing for taking up all the available parking downtown.
Neither county firefighters nor the Bolinas Volunteer Fire Department received any emergency calls following the earthquake. By Wednesday morning, the Bolinas General Store had been tidied up and was back in business, although news crews continued to interview employees there, said Ross, who was manning the deli counter once again.
The local temblor got its share of publicity, coming just hours after an estimated magnitude 7.4 quake in Turkey killed 2,000 and trapped as many as 10,000 in rubble. That earthquake was about 30,000 times more powerful than the one centered in Bolinas, according to the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park.
Point Reyes Station writer Phil Fradkin, author of Magnitude 8 about California's seismic history, said this week's rumbling is a reminder that earthquakes are a simple fact for everyone in proximity of the San Andreas fault. "It's just a reminder that these things are around and they're going to haunt us for us for as long as we live here and our descendants live here," he said.
Small aftershocks, many of them imperceptible without instruments, are expected to hit over next week. According to USGS estimates, there is less than a 10-percent chance that an aftershock of magnitude 5 or greater will strike in the vicinity of Bolinas, which was also the epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
The last major earthquake to shake West Marin was the 7.1 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which was centered about seven miles beneath the Santa Cruz mountains and released about 4,000 times as much energy as this week's temblor.
On the northern section of the San Andreas fault, between the Golden Gate and Cape Mendocino, the last sizable earthquake was an aftershock of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a magnitude 8.3 quake that killed around 800 and released about 60,000 times as much energy as this week's did.
Despite a jumpy network of connecting faults, the San Andreas itself has been fairly quiet for decades - until this week. Seismologist David Oppenheimer of the USGS said it's unlikely that the fault will give any indication when the next major earthquake is coming. "Some faults have no background seismism," he said. "When they go, they go with a bang."
Dave Mitchell and SF Dell contributed to this report