If you were at school today, you may have been having a casual 1st period on a Wednesday morning. But randomly, at around the 9:30 a.m. mark, your phone buzzed in your pocket. You reached for your phone, turned it on to notice that you had an emergency alert, telling you to duck and cover as an earthquake was hitting. This report was thanks to USGS alerting you, although Livermore was in no real danger. The real danger was in Isleton, California. And while a 4.1 is not a magnitude known for causing major damage, you can never be too safe.

Students might know that the quake came just just a day before Thursday’s Great ShakeOut, a statewide, annual drill that is programmed to send an emergency alert at 10:19 a.m. to cell phones across the state of California. This is obviously a funny coincidence, but it is funny that an actual earthquake happened before the annual drill on earthquakes.

Student Dylan Kandel thought that “I found it ironic that we had to deal with technically 2 earthquakes back to back, as I wasn’t even expecting there to be an earthquake worthy of an alert at all.”

Although all of California got an alert, it does not mean you were close to the earthquake. As previously stated, it hit close to a northern town of Isleton. So anyone in Southern California might have panicked for no apparent reason. Here in Livermore, the hit, if felt at all, would have affected slim to nobody.

So while for some the alert was a false alarm, and for others it might have been a real deal, for all its a coincidence that said earthquake happened only 1 day before California’s annual earthquake drill. What a week and what a quake.