“We felt the whole building moving underneath us,” said Jennifer McKnight, chef at the Boathouse Bar and Restaurant in Upper Lake, a city on the north shore of Clear Lake.
“The equipment in here was moving; I was trying to run outside, but I couldn’t,” she said. “it was too intense.”
The Lake County quake, which measured 5.1 on the Richter scale, was also followed by at least two smaller aftershocks, according to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
Officials with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park said the quake hit just before 8 p.m. and was centered 12 miles north of Upper Lake, while the two aftershocks were measured at magnitude 2.7 and 3.0.
Shaking was felt inland as far as Chico and as far west as Fort Bragg on the Pacific coast, the newspaper said.
McKnight said more than two dozen people were in the restaurant when the quake hit and nearly everyone evacuated while the building shook. There did not appear to any damage or injuries, she said.
“It felt like we were rolling on the ground, but nothing fell,” said Jessica Sanders, a server at the Boathouse.
“The building rolled very well with it,” she said.
McKnight said she called her husband at their house near the restaurant and he said the surface of the lake was shaking during the quake.
““I’ve lived in Lake County since I was 5 years old, and this was the strongest one I’ve ever felt,” she said.
No other damage was reported in any other cities around the lake, the newspaper said.
