Remote Nevada quakes could have been a disaster

RENO, Nev. — A trio of significant earthquakes that struck a remote part of western Nevada early Wednesday were big enough to cause as much as $1 billion in damage if they had been centered beneath a big city, a leading expert said Wednesday.

The first of two magnitude-5.7 quakes that began shortly after midnight and a third that registered 5.5 resulted in no injuries or reports of significant damage. The epicenter was east of the Sierra range and the Nevada-California line near rural Hawthorne about 100 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe and 90 miles south of Reno.

"Thankfully, it's not underneath a big city because a sequence of 5.7s could certainly do a lot of damage," said Graham Kent, director of the University of Nevada's Seismological Laboratory.

"If you put this underneath Reno, we are probably looking at a $1 billion event, probably with some fatalities and many casualties," he told The Associated Press. "It's much better to be beneath a ranch 20 miles outside of Hawthorne."

Read more: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/2016/12/remote_nevada_quakes_could_have_been_a_disaster