Where were you during the great California non-tsunami of December 2024?
When an unusually feisty earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area at 10:44 a.m. Thursday, most residents weren’t especially alarmed. Minor to moderate wobbles from small or distant quakes are a normal occurrence here.
But when phones began buzzing sharply with government alerts warning of an incoming tsunami, a more unusual situation had arrived.
“It was very frightening,” 86-year-old Carol Ruth Silver, a retired lawyer and veteran San Francisco politician, told The Independent. “It didn’t say how far up [the waves] were going to go… my thoughts were: let’s get out of here!”
Within about ten minutes, Silver and her companions were bundling into a car and heading for a nearby hilltop – just like many San Franciscans who took the warning seriously and fled for higher ground.
As a flurry of texts and calls to loved ones spread across the city, police officers and firefighters roamed the shorelines with loudspeakers telling people to evacuate, while schools, businesses, and beaches rapidly emptied.
No massive waves ever showed up, and the tsunami warning was cancelled at 11:54am. Officials stressed that this was not a “false alarm” and that there had been an “actual threat”, which thankfully did not come to pass.
Yet in the short time between those two alerts, Bay Area residents went through a wide range of reactions: from sudden panic to eager curiosity to indifferent resignation in the face of impending death.
And in a city whose denizens are always looking over their shoulder for the next “big one” – though often not as prepared as they’d like to be amid the daily hustle – even the relief sometimes had an uneasy edge.
“We were happy that there was no destruction or injuries or anything, but also we kind of wanted to see a little action,” said Danny Diekroeger, a 32-year-old cryptocurrency entrepreneur and former minor league baseball player who climbed a nearby hill in the hope of livestreaming the waves.
Silver was drinking her morning coffee and eating her oatmeal at her home in San Francisco’s Mission district when she got the alert.
While still absorbing it, a friend arrived and showed her the US government’s official danger map – with the entire San Francisco peninsula marked in bright red.
“A series of powerful waves and strong currents may impact coasts near you. You are in danger,” read the message sent to Californian smartphones. “Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now. Keep away from the coast until local officials say it is safe to return.”
San Franciscans are used to being told that they should always be ready for disaster. The Bay Area sprawls atop a confluence of geological fault lines, and California officials predict a 48 percent of a magnitude 7.5 or greater quake striking somewhere in the state within the next 30 years.
