The BC coast earthquake that wasn't there ... USGS removes alert of BC seismic event for Monday afternoon

An alert of a 6.5 earthquake north of Bella Bella
was quickly taken down by the USGS on Monday

A quickly deleted entry to the USGS website today has served to take back an alert from mid Monday afternoon. 

A notification that had originally stated that a 6.5 magnitude Earthquake had struck the Central Coast.

The Original notice placed the epicentre of the now phantom event  east of Klemtu, North of Bella Bella and South of Kitimat.

The alert was only on the USGS website for a few minutes before a deletion notice was posted for the information that had been listed at 2:17 PM

No official explanation from the USGS has been issued as of yet to explain why the original notice was generated. Though commentary on the agency's twitter feed suggests a false automated report was generated.

**Update**  USGS has now noted that the alert was falsely generated by an automatic system

The short period of time for the original alert did not make it into the information stream for EmergencyInfoBC which is responsible for such advisories across the province.

The false alarm of today does however serve as a reminder towards the active nature of the fault lines of the region and the potential for such large seismic events.

For more notes on past seismic events both actual and phantom see our archive page here.