No damage reported as 4.4 Berkeley quake rocks Bay Area

The 4.4-magnitude earthquake that struck near Berkeley early Thursday damaged mainly the sleep of hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents who were shaken awake, but it also rattled the serenity of those who know the likelihood of a far more serious quake looms.

Seismic experts said aftershocks are likely in the coming days, though their severity is unpredictable. The quake could be a precursor to a larger one, they said, but the chance of that occurring is just 5 percent.

Still, the quake was a mild jolt of a reminder that there’s a one-in-three chance that a 6.7 or greater earthquake will hit the Bay Area in the next 30 years, according to the USGS. The Hayward Fault is overdue for a large quake, seismologists say.

Thursday’s quake, which took place at 2:39 a.m., was centered two miles east-southeast of Berkeley at a depth of eight miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It struck on the Hayward Fault, near the Claremont Hotel.

“The shaking was widespread, that’s not unexpected for an earthquake of this magnitude,” Keith Knudsen, a USGS geologist, said during a morning press briefing at the agency’s science center in Menlo Park.

People were awakened from the North Bay to San Jose, and some as far away as Sacramento and Monterey reported feeling the shaking, but there were no reports of serious injuries or damage worse than items knocked off shelves.

“Nothing that we’ve heard of,” a Berkeley police dispatcher said a half hour after the quake. “We felt it, but we’re not getting a lot of calls. People are probably asleep.”

Not everyone slept through it, however. According to the USGS, an estimated 9.8 million people felt the earthquake.

The last big earthquake in the Bay Area struck in Napa on Aug. 24, 2014, with a magnitude of 6.0. It killed one person, injured at least 200 and caused more than $500 million in damage.

“We live in earthquake country,” Knudsen said, “we should all expect earthquakes.”