The 6.5-magnitude earthquake in a remote area of the state, felt as far as California and Utah, was the strongest there since the 1950s, an expert said.
A 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck a remote area in western Nevada early on Friday, damaging a major highway and shaking homes as far as Utah and California.
There were no reports of widespread damage in the sparsely populated area. But sections of highway U.S. 95, which runs north-south, were closed in Esmeralda and Mineral Counties because of damage, the Department of Transportation said.
The quake was felt by some in Northern California and Salt Lake City, hundreds of miles from the epicenter. It struck about 35 miles outside the small town of Tonopah, which has a population of about 2,400, at about 4:30 a.m. local time, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Andria Williams, 66, the manager of the Jim Butler Inn & Suites motel in Tonopah, was drinking her first cup of coffee of the day when she felt the earthquake. Her dogs went “nuts,” she said. Items fell off the kitchen counter. Hanging potted plants started swinging as the motion of the earth grew.
“It was a little rattle that kept getting bigger and stronger,” she said when reached by telephone. “These kinds of things — 20 seconds can seem like five minutes.”
Graham Kent, the director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory, said that an earthquake of that intensity has not hit the state in 66 years, even though it lies in a 100-mile-wide zone of active faults known as Walker Lane, which straddles the Nevada and California border.
“All of a sudden we have a big earthquake,” Dr. Kent said on Friday. “The most interesting piece of this puzzle is that in Nevada, we have not had an earthquake of this magnitude since 1954. Sooner or later mother nature is going to catch up.”
The last comparable earthquakes in Nevada took place in 1954, when there were a pair east of the city of Fallon that measured 7.1 and 6.8, he said.
Friday’s earthquake struck about 200 miles from Las Vegas. Six aftershocks, between 4.5 and 5.1-magnitude in strength, rippled through the region after the main earthquake, the laboratory said.
The U.S.G.S. forecast a 4 percent chance of more aftershocks as large or larger than 6.5-magnitude in the region within the next week, said Paul S. Earle, a U.S.G.S. seismologist.
The U.S.G.S.’s preliminary measurements showed the earthquake was 1.7 miles deep; the estimate would be refined with further study of the event, Mr. Earle said in an interview.
Dr. Kent said more extensive measurements have put it as deep as three miles.
Light to moderate shaking was felt in larger cities in the state, including Reno and Las Vegas, as well as in Fresno and Sacramento in California.
In Fresno, Lance Cardoza, a media consultant, posted a video of his lights swinging on social media.
Mr. Cardoza, 48, said he was awakened by creaking noises and shaking in his 12th-floor loft — and his immediate thought was that someone had broken into his apartment. Then he saw his chandelier and television, both of them installed with chains, swinging.
“Because the building is so high, I felt it swaying and I felt a little dizzy,” he said when reached by telephone. “It lasted for about a good 30 seconds.”
Dr. Kent said that in the past six weeks there had been “quite a number of earthquakes throughout the western U.S.” They included a 6.5-magnitude earthquake in Idaho; a 6.0 in Southern California and a 5.7 in Salt Lake City, he said.
In 1992, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake occurred 270 miles away from Tonopah, east of the Sierra Nevada range, which caused three fatalities and 400 injuries.
