Series of earthquakes rattle Lake Tahoe region

A series of earthquakes hit the Lake Tahoe region Thursday night, officials said.

A magnitude 4.7 quake, the largest of the three, occurred at 9:35 p.m. PT about 12 miles northwest of Truckee, California, a town just outside of Lake Tahoe, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

No injuries or damages were immediately reported.

An alert was sent out by the ShakeAlert notification system, which detects a quake before shaking arrives and warns residents in the nearby region.

The temblor was preceded by a magnitude 3.2 quake in the same area at 9:26 p.m., according to the USGS. The last one, a magnitude 3.1 quake, occurred at 9:37 p.m. about 9 miles southeast of Sierraville, an area just 24 miles northwest of Truckee.

NBC Bay Area meteorologist Jeff Ranieri tweeted that the quakes could be felt there, noting that the largest one was close to the location of a magnitude 6.0 temblor in 1966. Buildings and infrastructure at the time sustained minor damage, but nobody was killed or injured, according to the USGS.

Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist with USGS’s National Earthquake Information Center, told The San Francisco Chronicle that Thursday's quakes were a "fairly-common-sized" quake for the area.

"Usually several of these occur every decade in this region,” he said.