The Associated Press released a news story stating that a 3.2 magnitude earthquake occurred 13 miles north of Palm Springs on Sunday September 25. The fact of the matter is that no such quake occurred.
What did happen was what is called a "teleseism". Teleseisms are seismic waves caused by distant earthquakes. In this case, the teleseisms were caused by the 7.5 earthquake in Peru, which occurred several minutes before the teleseisms arrived in Southern California.
The Southern California Seismic Network's automatic earthquake detection system mistakenly thought the waves were those of a small local quake. Those who have pagers connected to the SCSN (Caltech/USGS employees, first responders, utility companies, and media) received a page (or automatic email) for a M3.2 quake near Desert Hot Springs at that time. As it turns out, the SCSN Duty Seismologist removed the event from the Simpson Map (the California earthquake map).
All earthquakes that occur are reviewed by a human. The automatic detection system is not perfect and sometimes mis-reports earthquakes.
Associated Press writers released this story without confirming that a quake actually occurred.
The quake in question was removed from the system within just a few minutes. Yet the news story lives on. Still, no reports of damage or injuries....
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