3.2 Quake Rattles East Bay

(Bay City News) A 3.2-magnitude earthquake shook the East Bay this afternoon, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake struck at 2:52 p.m. in roughly the same area that has experienced several 3.0-magnitude or larger seismic events in recent weeks, according to the USGS.

This afternoon's earthquake was centered 2 miles north of Piedmont and 4 miles southeast of Berkeley. It had a depth of 4 miles, according to the USGS.

BART trains were experiencing minor delays of less than 10 minutes across the system because of the quake, according to a dispatcher.

After an earthquake, the transit system holds its trains momentarily before allowing them to proceed to the next station in manual mode, the dispatch said.

Here is USGS information on the quake and a map of the epicenter.

KQED's Lauren Sommer last week interviewed Keith Knudsen of the USGS Earthquake Science Center about what we know and what we don’t know about a major earthquake hitting the Bay Area, in light of the recent series of temblors to hit so near the same spot.

"This really isn’t all that unusual for the Hayward Fault," Knudsen said. "At first, it seemed a little unusual but we’ve looked back into the recent records and there have been similar swarms of small earthquakes just in the last ten years. There was a swarm in 2006 and another in 2003 just a mile or two to the south."

Read the interview here.