A sizable early morning earthquake centered near Silver Springs, Nevada was felt strongly in Reno and Lake Tahoe, as well as parts of Northern California.

The 5.2M quake struck at 1:17 am Friday in western Nevada, about 40 miles east-southeast of Reno — 12 miles southeast of Silver Springs.

According to the US Geological Survey, the quake had a depth of around 3 miles, and was followed by five smaller aftershocks.

There were subsequent earthquakes centered in the same vicinity near Silver Springs measuring between magnitude 2.5 and 2.7, occurring at 1:22 am, 1:23 am, 3:32 am, 3:35 am, and 4:48 am.

Shaking from the initial quake could be felt as far west as Sacramento, according the USGS Shakemap.

As the Chronicle notes, this part of western Nevada has been experiencing an earhquake swarm that has included several quakes of significant size and hundreds of smaller ones in recent weeks.

A 5.7M quake struck the area on April 13, and there was also a 4.8M quake on April 22.

Photo via Wikimedia

Millions of Northern California residents received a Shake Alert warning at 8:06 am Thursday about an earthquake with an epicenter in Lyon County, Nevada, but the quake itself soon disappeared from the USGS website, and the agency said it was a false alarm.

An alarming "Drop, cover, hold on" message popped onto the phones of Bay Area residents this morning with the MyShake app or other warning system, warning of imminent shaking from a large earthquake in Nevada, centered near Dayton — which is 29 miles south of Reno, and about 12 miles east of Carson City. But now it looks like that was all just a false alarm.

The US Geological Survey posted to Xitter at 8:45 am apologizing for the alert, saying, "There was no M5.9 earthquake near Carson City, NV. We are currently looking into why the alerts were issued."

Subsequently, the USGS-managed Shake Alert system posted a message saying the incident was being investigated, and added, "This system has delivered more than 170 real alerts since 2019 and this incident is both unprecedented and rare."

Was the USGS hacked? Did somebody's truck drive over an earthquake sensor in the desert?

We may know more soon. Angie Lux, a scientist at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, which manages the MyShake app, tells the Chronicle, "It’s gonna take a little bit of time to understand exactly what happened with the system, but we can say that there was no earthquake and that we’re looking into what happened."

And maybe this is just me, but it also seems like the MyShake messaging was kind of extreme for an earthquake that happened hundreds of miles away, which was likely only to cause minor shaking in the Bay Area, if any at all?

This is a developing story and has been updated.

If you see illegal fireworks this weekend, they are almost certainly from one of about 13 perfectly legal fireworks stores in Nevada. And a look at these stores’ Yelp pages shows that almost all of their reviews are from California residents.

You wouldn’t know it from the way San Francisco sounds at night this time of year, but all forms of fireworks are illegal in the state of California, unless handled by a licensed professional. Yet we seem to know where these illegal fireworks are coming from.

A report from an SF Civil Grand Jury last year stated that “The San Francisco firework explosions booming around the city are more likely‬‭ from fireworks that are illegal in California but which are for sale in the neighboring state of‬‭ Nevada.” A similar state report from 2024 concludes that “Most informed estimates suggest that the thirteen stores immediately across the [Nevada-California] border account for at least 60 to 70 percent of the illegal fireworks used in California.” So yes, people are driving to Nevada to stock up on fireworks that are perfectly legal there, though completely illegal here.

A look at this Google Search map of “Nevada fireworks stores” shows that golly, a whole lot of these stores are concentrated right at the Nevada border! The Chronicle looks into the practice of Californians smuggling fireworks in from Nevada, with a focus on a legal fireworks shop in Schurz, Nevada, called Bad Jack’s Fireworks.

“You walk in the store, and it’s like a Walmart but all fireworks,” a Bay Area shopper who identified himself simply as Trevor told the Chronicle. “Probably 75% of the people in the store were from California.”

Bad Jack’s is not the only one. A Wadsworth, Nevada store with the misleading name Pyramid Lake Tribal Enterprises has lines stretching out the door. The Yelp photos from another Wadsworth store called I-80 Smoke Shop and Camping make it clear that cigarettes and camping gear are certainly not their primary line of business. And much like those other two shops, the Yelp reviews for Bad Jack’s are written almost entirely by California customers.  

We don’t know if big recent SF fireworks busts, like last week’s stolen U-Haul full of fireworks in the Bayview, are all explosives smuggled in from Nevada. Certainly some are probably from China. But it’s pretty difficult for law enforcement to stop the flow of a product that can simply be bought right across the state line in Nevada.  

Some officials seem resigned that this flow on Nevada fireworks cannot be stopped, and just urge people to be as careful as possible with the explosives. San Mateo County Sheriff's Office Sergeant Phil Hallworth told the Chronicle that people should “just use some common sense. Keep a water hose handy, or a bucket. Never be afraid to call 911, if you see someone using illegal fireworks or if a fire does happen.”

Related: Police In San Francisco and San Jose Seize Large Hauls of Illegal Fireworks Ahead of July 4th Holiday [SFist]

Image: Katelyn L via Yelp

Photo: Sean Boyd

Washoe County commissioners are in discussions to add an extra fee onto Burning Man tickets to maintain a stretch of road that 70,000 Burners tromp across every Labor Day weekend.

Bay Area people who attend Burning Man know that the directions are pretty easy. You take I-80 east all the way until you get to Fernley, Nevada, and then hang a left at Love’s Travel Stop, and Route 447 will take you pretty much all the way to the event. The week of Burning Man is when that Route 447 sees vastly, vastly more traffic than any other time of year on the fairly remote, rural road.

Now the county in which that rural road is located wants a little more help from Burning Man to help maintain Route 447. Nevada’s KRNV reports Washoe County commissioners considered whether to add an “impact fee” onto Burning Man tickets to help maintain county roads.

"I'm not looking to burn the house down with them or gouge them," commission chair Vaughn Hartung said at the commission's April 26 meeting. “But like we do with a lot of things, we impose impact fees. When you build a house, you pay a regional road impact fee. It's just a matter of maintaining the road for them and for their event so that people can get in and out safely, and they're not dealing with worn roadways.”

There was no formal proposal before the commissioners, nor a dollar amount discussed. In fact, the matter was not even on their agenda, it’s just a conversation that was struck up over the course of the meeting. But Hartung said, “I do want to bring this back,” and there seemed pretty much unanimous support among the commissioners.

"I can't imagine they'd have any problem putting a surcharge on a ticket,” commissioner Kitty Jung said. “They basically print money. There's never been a day that the tickets didn't sell out within hours of any price you put out there, because it’s so beloved.”

Jung is correct on the point that Burning Man tickets always sell out right away (this year it took but 29 minutes). Surely the Burning Man Project would argue they are not “printing money,” they've actually encountered financial problems after two years of COVID cancellations. But they are getting better at monetizing their top revenue demographic, and certainly nobody blinked that tickets were $100 more expensive this year than the event’s most previous official iteration in 2019.  

I myself have driven that road many times, and back in the late 1990s, it was basically just a glorified dirt road. It is in far nicer shape and easier to drive these days (albeit still peppered with 25 and 35 mile-per-hour speed limits). There is also the issue of whether Washoe County can do this, as Route 447 is a state route for portions, and a county route for others. But given the seemingly inelastic demand for Burning Man tickets, there seems a good chance that the Burning Man Project and Washoe County will come to some sort of arrangement without a big dust-up.

Related: ‘Renegade’ Burning Man Angers Sheriffs, But Draws 20,000, Including Paris Hilton and Diplo [SFist]

Image: A dominating woman gets a chariot ride across the playa during the15th annual Burning Man festival September 2, 2000 in the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, Nevada. Despite high winds, dust storms, and a bit of rain, some 27,000 people camped out on a remote desert playa, or dry lake, for the week-long counter-cultural celebration of art and "radical self-expression." This year's theme was the body. (Photo by David McNew/Newsmakers)

After a week-long search for a missing couple merely found an empty RV in Nevada, the couple was located, but 72-year-old Ronnie Barker was already dead.

For about the last week, the Las Vegas area has been gripped with the story of an Indiana couple who’d disappeared on an RV trip, Ronnie and Beverly Barker. On Tuesday, their distraught nephew Travis Peters told Las Vegas station KLAS that Nevada law enforcement authorities had “discovered the RV this afternoon around noon your time,” and that “Ronnie and Beverly were not with the RV, and the car was gone. All the Deputy could tell us is that it was buried in the mud.”

19 Best Places To Order Delivery Cannabis Flower in SF

Only order from the top marijuana delivery menus with the most reliable services. Eaze comes in at #1!

Top Cannabis Delivery Companies: Eaze Ranked #1

The couple was located later that day nearly 200 miles north of Las Vegas, but it’s not a particularly happy ending. KRON4 reports that the husband had already died, but wife 69-year-old Beverly Barker was airlifted to a Reno hospital and is recovering.

The pair were reportedly on an RV trip from Oregon to Arizona, but lost GPS service, and their text messages pleading for help did not go through. The RV got stuck in gravel and sand on a country road, so they unhooked the Kia Soul they were towing behind them, yet that got stuck before long, too, and the couple lived in that Kia for a week. This took a turn for the much worse when 72-year-old Ronnie Barker started having breathing problems.

“Beverly Barker said she would balance against her walker and use an N-95 face mask to scoop snow to bring back to her husband [for drinking water],” KRON4 reports. “The pair were also taking turns honking the horn in an SOS pattern.”

Nephew Travis Peters told KLAS, “Eventually peace came upon the both of them and Ronnie Barker passed away at 3:12 p.m. on Monday April 4.” This was only about 24 hours before the couple was found.

There are some questions being raised about the effectiveness of Nevada's Silver Alert System. “It’s our hope that Ronnie Barker’s legacy will be changing policy that will allow for a more expeditious approach to locating missing persons of all ages for both non-residents and residents of the state of Nevada,” the family said in a statement to KLAS. “We call upon the citizens of Nevada to stand up and demand that changes be made at ALL levels of Public Safety to avoid the hurdles that our family faced as we attempted to bring resources into the search of our loved ones.”

Related: USF Student Found Dead In Rented Tesla In Fresno County [SFist]

Image: Lucas Davies via Unsplash

A 51-year-old Berkeley man has been arrested and charged with attempted murder after he was injured in a horrific freeway crash that killed the driver of the car — which followed a freeway shooting in which the injured man is the only suspect.

Before the crash occurred on I-80 on Thursday morning, as the Reno Gazette-Journal reports, Nevada Highway Patrol received reports of shots fired at a pickup truck on the highway. Officers located the truck, a blue 2021 Chevrolet Silverado, riddled with bullets and its windshield shattered, and it's unclear if there were any injuries in that shooting.

Some media outlets have characterized the shooting as an act of road rage.

Subsequently, around 6:30 a.m., a black 2016 Acura speeding westbound on I-80 attempted to pass a big rig on the shoulder near the California-Nevada border. The Acura clipped the truck and the driver lost control of the car, which flipped across the median into the eastbound lanes. The car was then struck by a big rig traveling eastbound, killing the driver and injuring Laron Edward of Berkeley.

The driver of the Acura has been identified as 40-year-old Nichoel Davis of Grand Rapids, Michigan.  The crash briefly shut down all eastbound lanes of I-80 Thursday morning.

As the Associated Press reports, Edwards has since been booked for attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, discharging a firearm from a vehicle, and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. He's being held in jail in Washoe County, Nevada. The Reno Gazette-Journal says Edwards was also charged with "open murder."

The Nevada Department of Public Safety Investigations Division is investigating the shooting incident, and Nevada Highway Patrol is investigating the crash. The NHP is urging anyone with information about the crash to contact them at (775) 684-7430.

Photo via Nevada Highway Patrol

If you haven’t made your plans to attend Storm Area 51, you probably shouldn’t bother — as the organizers have moved the event 150 miles away to Las Vegas.

We are now technically within 24 hours of Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us, the Facebook prank event to which now two million people are allegedly “Going.” A negligible percentage of these people might go, but the original organizers won’t. They’ve canceled the event in favor of a far safer and more conventional meetup in Las Vegas called Alienstock, but local officials, and of course the U.S. government, continue to worry about throngs of conspiracy theorist mobbing the rural Nevada military base that supposedly alien bodies and their respective spacecraft.

“The United States Air Force is aware of the Facebook post," Air Force spokesperson Laura McAndrews told ABC 7 in July when the prank started picking up steam. "The Nevada Test and Training Range is an area where the Air Force tests and trains combat aircraft. As a matter of practice, we do not discuss specific security measures, but any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous."

This being a desert area, the weather is also potentially dangerous. While Accuweather currently predicts “Plenty of sunshine, nice” temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s, extreme storms are always a possibility. And storms might be the least of the alien enthusiasts’ worries.

“More people will get bitten by snakes than the Air Force arresting them or the sheriff arresting them, so they've got to really be cognizant and think about what they're doing," Alien Research Center owner George Harris told ABC 7, via AccuWeather,

Rachel, Nevada’s Little A'Le'Inn is still planning their own little festival near Area 51, also called Alienstock, and KRON 4 reports the original organizers have sent them a cease and desist letter over it. Which, frankly they should be thanking the Little A'Le'Inn for providing a safe and structured option, but apparently that concept is alien to them.

Related: Nevada Braces For Invasion of Alien Enthusiasts As ‘Storm Area 51’ Event Approaches [SFist]

Image: Facebook

Lincoln County, Nevada, population 5,200, has drawn up an emergency declaration as it prepares for as many as 40,000 alien conspiracy theorists to make contact with their remote Area 51.  

As of press time, two million people are marked as “Going” on Facebook to an event on September 20 called Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us, with an additional 1.5 million people marked as "Interested." One would imagine this is a prank, considering the event is "hosted by" a group called Shitposting cause im in shambles, and the event’s invite reads “We will all meet up in Rural Nevada and coordinate our parties. If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.” The official Storm Area 51 website has since toned it down, merely promoting some manner of vaguely described festival near, but not at, the Area 51 Air Force Base that is reputed in conspiracy lore to hold alien bodies and all manner of other top-secret artifacts.  

But local officials have become concerned enough by the online interest that they’ve drafted an emergency declaration to deal with the surge of alien enthusiasts, according to the Associated Press. The county realizes it lacks the infrastructure, hotel capacity, medical service and cellphone coverage to handle what Fox News describes as “100,000 people who show up to party and breach a military base where the government is allegedly keeping aliens and UFOs.”

“With the possibility of 35,000 to 40,000 people showing up, yeah, this is serious,” Lincoln County Commission chair Varlin Higbee said at Monday’s meeting, noting the September 20-22 event being held in a county with only 184 hotel rooms. “The cellphone system is going to go down. You get more than a couple of hundred people there, and it’s going to crash. Cell service won’t be available.”

The tenor of the event has switched from a supposed military base-storming to a couple of more mild-mannered festivals. The cult-favorite hotel The Little A'Le'Inn has been granted conditional permits to host a festival called Alienstock. Some 30 miles away, the Alien Research Center will be hosting their own Storm Area-51 Festival, whose organizers note, “neither the Lincoln County Sheriff or the United States Military will tolerate any illegal activity, so in simple terms, check yourself before you wreck yourself.” So, somebody's going to make money off this madness!

Despite all the attention, crowds might not even show up at all for this glorified prank. "We passed this with the caveat that this may or may not happen," said commissioner Kevin Phillips, according to the Reno Gazette Journal. "We're just trying to do the best we can to prepare for something we know not of. We have no pickin' idea what we're going to face — if anything."

Meanwhile, in another part of Nevada, a certain utopian village is currently under construction once more and awaiting its own invasion of tens of thousands of tourists.

Related: Jeff Goldblum On Jazz, Amy Winehouse, And Visits From Aliens [SFist]

Image: Airwolfhound via Flickr

A new UC Berkeley study has shown that gun violence in certain areas of California spike immediately following the opening of a gun show in Nevada. For about two weeks following a Nevada gun show, the occurrence of gun-related injuries and deaths sees an increase of up to 70% in towns "within convenient driving distance" of the border, says the study.

Researchers suspect that this has to do with Nevada's looser gun control laws, which, at the time of the study (2005-2013), didn't require background checks for "private sale" gun purchases. California requires background checks for all gun purchases made in the state, regardless of the type of sales. NBC Bay Area notes that since then, Nevada has passed a law requiring background checks for all sales, but it hasn't gone into effect quite yet. The study's lead author, Ellicott Matthay, wrote about the findings and their implications: "The study suggests that travel to less-restrictive states may threaten the effectiveness of firearm laws within California. When a less-restrictive is next to a state that is more restrictive, there may be spillover effects." Matthay continued: "Better understanding the long-term effects of gun show policies, and the patterns of acquisition and use of firearms, would provide important evidence to inform future efforts to prevent firearm injuries."

This study comes merely a few weeks after terrorist Stephen Paddock opened fire on Las Vegas concertgoers, killing 59 people and injuring 527 others. A few of his firearms were legally acquired, according to NBC News, who spoke to employees at two Nevada gun shops, where they attest that he passed the required background checks when he purchased weaponry them. It's unconfirmed whether the guns he purchased from those Nevada shops were used in the mass shooting, or if they were from the other gun shops he patronized — New Frontier Armory in North Las Vegas and Guns and Guitars in Mesquite, writes NBC News.

Last year, Governor Jerry Brown signed six gun reform bills into law, tightening restrictions and outright banning the sale of certain weapons in California. But just before the holiday, right before the laws were scheduled to take effect, the state saw a spike in the sale of semi-automatic rifles, with 364,643 rifles sold, as compared to the 153,931 in 2015.

What's clear is that while state law can only do so much, that doesn't reduce or eliminate the importance of having those laws in the first place. The LA Times spoke with Drs. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar and Frederick Rivara, who are both pediatricians and epidemiologists at the University of Washington, Seattle. They told them, "Laws regulating access to guns matter and do make a difference." Without federal law controlling the sale of guns, California's regulations could easily be circumvented. "It does not reduce the importance of the laws but does reduce their impact."

Related: Facebook Engineer Fights For Gun Groups After Company Bans Sales Between Users

Residents of both California and Nevada were awakened early Wednesday by a series of 5.5-5.7 magnitude earthquakes that struck in a remote area near Lake Tahoe.

The US Geological Survey reports that the first quake struck at 12:18 PT this morning near Hawthorne, Nevada, in an area about 70 miles from South Lake Tahoe, California. It had a magnitude of 5.7, which places it in the higher range of earthquake intensity, according to the USGS.

Another 5.7 struck the same spot four minutes later. A third quake, registered at a 5.5, hit the spot at 1:13 a.m. In between those events and throughout the morning, over 60 aftershocks were noted, with some showing magnitudes as high as 3.5.

As you can see from the USGS' "Did You Feel It?" map above, the seismic events were felt throughout Northern California and Nevada. According to a USGS spokesperson, people in Yosemite National Park, Mammoth Lakes, and Carson City all reported "strong shaking" during the quakes.

The Associated Press reports that the quakes did "trigger burglar alarms at two businesses, and caused a rock slide that did not block a nearby highway" in the area near the epicenter. As of publication time, no other injuries or damage have been reported.

This just in via social media and one of my many friends and acquaintances who are playa-bound already: Burners en route to Black Rock City were allegedly being entrapped by cops in tiny Wadsworth, Nevada, just north of I-80 along highway 447, on the last leg of the trip toward Gerlach and the Black Rock Desert, and being given tickets just for sport.

Says this friend: "They have a pedestrian standing at a crosswalk in Wadsworth and any car that doesn't yield is getting pulled over. The pedestrian does not look like he's actively going to cross. He looks like a guy with a walkie talkie who's part of the 5-6 cop cars pulling people over."

The situation sounds pretty sketchy, and was occurring just before noon Friday as early-arriving Burners began flowing off the exit to 447, heading north. "It's confusing and a complete set up," says the witness. "Every single car is getting pulled over. Be careful on your drive in. They're taking complete advantage."

This may be Nevada Highway Patrol or Washoe County sheriff's deputies — that part is unclear — and we obviously can't independently confirm this is happening.

But you've been warned.

Previously: Nine Awesome Pieces Of Burning Man Art To Look For On The Playa

In three days, the "playa," a remote portion of the Nevada desert that becomes a makeshift city of 70,000 during the annual Burning Man festival, has experienced two earthquakes.

The AP reported the first quake last Thursday in the Reno Gazette-Journal, a 3.5 magnitude event per the US Geological Survey. Then, yesterday, CBS SF and the AP report the second quake, magnitude 3.6.

In a remote region near Gerlach more than 100 miles northeast of Carson City, few felt the effects of the tremors. University of Nevada’s Seismology Laboratory told the AP that the area has seen more seismic activity recently. After the second quake, Washoe County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Bob Harmon told CBS and the AP that no damage had been reported.

Burning Man will occur this year on August 28th through September 5th.

Related: Missing Burning Man? Watch This Feature-Length Film From BM 2015

The owners of a two-year-old Great Dane from Sparks, Nevada are attempting to get their enormous dog into the Guinness Book of World Records. Yes, Great Danes are always enormous, horse-like pets, but Rocko is especially big, standing 40 inches (three and a half feet) tall from paw to shoulder, and seven feet tall if he's up on his hind legs.

As San Francisco's KGO-TV shows us in the video above, owners Nicholas Helms and Jessica Williams didn't know when they got Rocko as a puppy that he'd grow to be quite so freakishly large. "He sprouted like a weed," says Helms.

And no, you will not win at tug-of-war with Rocko.

They think he might have a shot as "tallest living dog," because a Great Dane named Zeus in Michigan, who took the record for tallest dog ever at 44 inches high back in 2011, is no longer with us — he died at age 5 in 2014. Giant George, who held the record prior to Zeus, stood at 43 inches, and made an appearance on Oprah.

Also, as Williams says, Rocko seems to be smarter and more "emotionally connected" than most other dogs, with that huge brain of his. "He'll cry at the TV if, like, an animal is being hurt on a documentary or something. He gets really upset. He's weird."

Related: Video: All Hail Peanut, The World's Ugliest Dog