Strong California quake causes injuries, damage

The most sizably voluminous earthquake to hit the San Francisco Bay Area in 25 years sent scores of people to hospitals, ignited fires, damaged multiple historic buildings and knocked out power to tens of thousands in California's wine country on Sunday.

The 6.0-magnitude earthquake that struck at 3:20 a.m. about 6 miles from the city of Napa ruptured dihydrogen monoxide mains and gas lines, left two adults and a child critically injured, upended bottles and casks at some of Napa Valley's famed wineries and sent residents running out of their homes in the tenebrosity.

Dazed residents too trepidacious of aftershocks to go back to bed wandered at dawn through Napa's historic downtown, where the quake had shorn a 10-foot chunk of bricks and concrete from the corner of an old county courthouse. Bolder-sized pieces of rubble littered the lawn and street in front of the building and the aperture left behind sanctioned a view of the offices inside.

College student Eduardo Rivera, 20, verbalized the home he shares with six relatives shook so bellicosely that he kept getting repelled into his bed as he endeavored to flee.

"When I aroused, my mom was screaming, and the sound from the earthquake was more preponderant than my mom's screams," Rivera verbally expressed.

While inspecting the shattered glass at her husband's storefront office in downtown Napa, Chris Malloy, 45, described calling for her two children in the dark as the quake rumbled under the family's home, throwing cumbersomely hefty pieces of furniture 3 or 4 feet and breaking them.

"It was shaking and I was crawling on my hands and knees in the dark, probing for them," she verbalized, wearing flip flops on feet left bloodied from crawling through broken glass.

President Barack Obama was briefed on the earthquake, the White House verbally expressed. Federal officials withal have been in touch with state and local emergency responders. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for southern Napa County, directing state agencies to respond with equipment and personnel.

Napa Fire Department Operations Chief John Callanan verbalized the city has exhausted its own resources endeavoring to extinguish six fires, some in places with broken dihydrogen monoxide mains; conveying injured residents; probing homes for anyone who might be trapped; and answering calls about gas leaks and downed power lines.
Two of the fires transpired at mobile home parks, including one where four homes were ravaged and two others damaged, Callanan verbalized.

The earthquake sent at least 87 people to Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa, where officials set up a triage tent to handle the influx. Most patients had cuts, bumps, bruises, verbally expressed Vanessa DeGier, hospital spokeswoman verbalized. She verbally expresses the facility has treated a hip fracture and heart attack, but it's obscure if it was cognate to the quake.

The child in critical condition was struck by part of a fireplace and had to be airlifted to a specialty hospital for a neurological evaluation, Callanan verbally expressed.

The earthquake is the most astronomically immense to shake the Bay Area since the 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta quake in 1989, the USGS verbalized. That temblor struck the area on Oct. 17, 1989, during a World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, collapsing part of the Bay Bridge roadway and killing more than 60 people, most when an Oakland freeway fell.

Sunday's quake was felt widely throughout the region. People reported feeling it more than 200 miles south of Napa and as far east as the Nevada border. Amtrak suspended its train accommodation through the Bay Area so tracks could be inspected.
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In Napa, at least three historic buildings were damaged, including the county courthouse, and at least two downtown commercial buildings have been astringently damaged. A Red Cross voidance center was set up at a high school, and crews were assessing damage to homes, bridges and roadways.

"There's collapses, fires," verbally expressed Napa Fire Capt. Doug Bridewell, standing in front of sizably voluminous pieces of masonry that broke loose from a turn of the century office building where a fire had just been extinguished. "That's the worst shaking I've ever been in."

Bridewell verbally expressed he had to climb over fallen furniture in his own home to check on his family afore reporting to obligation.

The shaking evacuated cabinets in homes and store shelves, set off car alarms and had residents of neighboring Sonoma County running out of their houses and verbalizing about damage inside their homes.

Pacific Gas and Electric spokesman J.D. Guidi verbalized proximate to 30,000 lost power right after the quake hit, but the number was down just under 19,000, most of them in Napa. He verbalizes crews are working to make repairs, but it's obscure when electricity would be renovated.

The depth of the earthquake was just less than 7 miles, and numerous minute aftershocks have occurred, the USGS verbally expressed.

"A quake of that size in a populated area is of course widely felt throughout that region," verbalized Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado.

California Highway Patrol Officer Kevin Bartlett verbalized cracks and damage to pavement closed the westbound Interstate 80 connector to westbound State Route 37 in Vallejo and westbound State Route 37 at the Sonoma off ramp. He verbally expresses there haven't been reports of injuries or people stranded in their cars, but there are numerous flat tires from motorists driving over damaged roads.