A 4.4 magnitude earthquake shook parts of western Oregon Friday morning. The quake was centered in a rural area east of Lebanon, and there were no reports of damage or injuries.
The temblor was among the strongest land-based quakes to hit Oregon in recent years, but people who signed up for the ShakeAlert early warning system didn’t get notified.
That wasn’t a mistake, said Doug Toomey, the director of the Oregon Hazards Lab at the University of Oregon.
“The community ought to know that the system performed excellently during the event, and correctly characterized it, and decided not to send out an alert because it was below the threshold for alerting the public,” he said.
The alert system kicks in at magnitude 4.5 or higher. Toomey said that since the app was released to the public in March, 2021, there have been no quakes in Oregon strong enough to trigger a notification. Given the region’s history of quakes, however, he said it’s only a matter of time before that happens. Some quakes in Oregon in the past 30 years, for instance, would have been strong enough to trigger ShakeAlert notifications.
“We can expect in the future that we will have earthquakes of those sizes, and on the basis of how well it performed today, we would be sending alerts out to the public,” he said.
The ShakeAlert app is free to download, and is available on both Apple and Android operating systems. It's available to use in Oregon, Washington and California.
The USGS website has information about how to download the app and related mobile services.
With Friday's quake coming at a time of day when many Oregonians were still asleep, Toomey said it's important to know how the ShakeAlert app functions.
"The ShakeAlert system will send out an alert if 'do not disturb' is on," he said. "However, if it's on airplane mode, then the device cannot receive messages via cellular, but could if wifi is still on."
