San Diego

What's Up With Those ‘Booms' Heard Across San Diego?

Guesses rumble through the county as some wonder if the boom was an earthquake.

NBC Universal, Inc.

It felt like an earthquake, but it wasn’t quite that, NBC 7’s Shandel Menezes reports.

Did you hear "the booms" Monday afternoon? Some people say it rattled their homes. Others say it scared their pets.

NBC 7’s Director of Technology, Mike Fouch, was in a meeting at his computer when he felt it.

“It felt like it shook the windows a little bit,” he said. “One of my colleagues was like ‘did we just have an earthquake?’”

It may have felt like an earthquake, but according to the US Geological Survey, it wasn’t quite that. What people may have felt were Camp Pendleton's live-fire trainings with high explosive munitions.

NBC 7 spoke with a Camp Pendleton spokeswoman Taylor Schrick who couldn’t say for sure if the “booms” were theirs.

Schrick also said people can hear training explosions up to 50 miles away from the base.

NBC 7 meteorologist Sheena Parveen added weather can affect this.

“Whenever we have a more humid air mass and there’s more moisture in the atmosphere, sound actually travels further. It’s because the air is more buoyant,” she said.

The weather could also explain why neighbors down in Chula Vista heard and felt it, too.

Parveen wants people to the booms are nothing to worry about.

“Be happy they’re our planes and not somebody else’s,” she said.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the closest earthquake to San Diego shook 350 miles away in Bishop, CA.

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