On the 24th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake that struck the Bay Area, organizers at the Tech Museum in San Jose were holding a big earthquake drill to remind residents how to "drop, cover and hold on."
The annual "Great California Shakeout" was scheduled to be held at 10:17 a.m. on Thursday, where gusts of the museum can experience the "Quake Cottage" mobile earthquake simulator that mimic the intensity of an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale.
This is the fifth annual Shakeout event, and 9.5 million Californians are registered this year to participate in some sort of event, according to ShakeOut.org.
The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 occurred on Oct. 17 at 5:04 p.m. during the World Series baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. The quake measured 6.9 on the Richter scale. A total of 63 people were killed and more than 3,700 were injured.
For more information on the drill at The Tech, click here.
California has not experienced a devastating quake since the 1994 Northridge disaster that killed 60 people and injured more than 7,000 in metropolitan Los Angeles.
Thursday was also the 24th anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta disaster, a magnitude-6.9 earthquake in the San Francisco Bay region that killed 63 people, injured almost 3,800 and caused up to $10 billion damage.
In recent weeks, parts of the world have been rattled by powerful quakes, including a magnitude-7.1 jolt that killed more than 100 people in the Philippines and damaged historic churches.
Drill organizers said this year's focus was on fires that may be sparked by ruptured utility lines after a quake. One of the scenarios at the Rosemont school involved such a scenario.
Several countries, including Japan and Mexico, have an alert system that gives a few precious seconds of warning to residents after a large quake. Last month, California Gov. Jerry Brown approved a law directing state emergency officials to find ways to fund a statewide quake early warning system by 2016.
