Offshore Quake Thursday Creates Tsunami Warning, Evacuations on Southern Oregon Coast

Published 12/08/24 at 2:55 a.m.
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Reedsport, Oregon) - Early Thursday morning, a significant earthquake struck just offshore from Eureka, California, prompting a brief yet alarming tsunami warning from the U.S. Tsunami Warning System and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This led towns along the southern Oregon coast to issue evacuation alerts.

The earthquake, measuring a magnitude of 7.0, hit 45 miles southwest of Eureka at 10:44 a.m. Such a magnitude meets the threshold for potential tsunamis. By 10:49 a.m., the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska, had issued a tsunami warning stretching from San Francisco to the southern Oregon coast.

Reedsport activated its levee system, and all south coast towns had one degree of warning or another: Bandon, Coos Bay, Port Orford, Gold Beach and Brookings.

At a magnitude 7.0, that is the threshold for the possibilities of a tsunami.

“There is a tsunami warning for the southern Oregon coast from the California border northward to the Douglas / Lane county line. If you are in the warned area, move inland to higher ground,” the warning initially read.

Some 1.3 million people live along that stretch of the warning, said the US Geological Survey (USGS).

Just before noon, the warning was cancelled, but not before many in south coast towns of Brookings, Gold Beach, Bandon, Coos Bay and Reedsport went to higher ground. In Brookings, webcams at the harbor showed fishing boats heading out to sea quickly after the alert went out.

Battle Rock, Port Orford, courtesy Flickr / Julia Sumangil

Oregon State Parks closed all beaches in that region. They were reopened around 3 p.m.

Luckily, this event was a side-to-side quake in the southern quake zone, and not a strike-slip. That would have caused a tsunami. This area – from northern California through to just north of Coos Bay – gets quakes quite often, and it has nothing to do with the “big one” expected from the Cascadia faultline. That one could happen tomorrow, in the next few weeks, or maybe not for another few hundred years.

“The fault system where the earthquake originated is in the Mendocino Fracture Zone, which is the boundary between the Pacific and Juan de Fuca oceanic plates,” said Oregon Emergency Management Thursday.

Above Coos Bay - photo Manuela Durson - see Manuela Durson Fine Arts

Oregon Coast Visitors Association (OCVA) has some employees living on the south coast, including Dave Lacey in Gold Beach and Stacy Gunderson in Brookings.

Later afternoon on Thursday, no one as yet had any numbers on how many people evacuated, but Gunderson told Oregon Coast Beach Connection Brookings has some natural safeguards.

“Fortunately, much of the town is in the 'safe' zone,” she said. “I can say the schools stayed open and for the most part, it was business as usual.”

“All an abundance of caution,” said OCVA's Lacey.

Above Yoakam Point - photo Manuela Durson - see Manuela Durson Fine Arts

In Reedsport, the town activated its levee system, manmade walls which can keep out waves up to a certain height. Many there went to higher ground or were told to get behind the levee system.

In Coos Bay, Janice Langlinais, executive director of Oregon’s Adventure Coast, said there was much movement in that town as well.

“We did evacuate because the Coos Bay visitor center is in the center of downtown,” Langlinais said. “Most of the downtown was evacuated to higher ground, but as soon as the warning was canceled, people started moving back into the downtown core.”

Near Gold Beach, photo Manuela Durson - see Manuela Durson Fine Arts

Around the Port Orford area, Cape Blanco Heritage Society's Rebecca Malamud-Evans said that while she was already inland and stayed there after the warning. She got the impression from her social media feed that area had a slightly “chaotic” evacuation.

Oregon officials will evaluate the response as they did in previous tsunami alerts on the coast, including the largescale one in 2011. Looking Back: Tsunami Scare on Oregon Coast

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