RENO, Nev. (AP) — A trio of significant earthquakes that struck a remote part of western Nevada early Wednesday were big enough to cause as much as $1 billion in damage if they had been centered beneath a big city, a leading expert said Wednesday.The first of two magnitude-5.7 quakes that began shortly after midnight and a third that registered 5.5 resulted in no injuries or reports of significant damage. The epicenter was east of the Sierra range and the Nevada-California line near rural Hawthorne about 100 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe and 90 miles south of Reno.“Thankfully, it’s not underneath a big city because a sequence of 5.7s could certainly do a lot of damage,” said Graham Kent, director of the University of Nevada’s Seismological Laboratory.“If you put this underneath Reno, we are probably looking at a $1 billion event, probably with some fatalities and many casualties,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s much better to be beneath a ranch 20 miles outside of Hawthorne.”In addition to Reno and Carson City, Wednesday’s biggest temblor was felt in Las Vegas and more than 200 miles away in San Francisco, according to the university’s Seismological Lab in Reno.The first magnitude-5.7 event struck at 12:18 a.m., followed by another 5.7 four minutes later 18 miles southwest of Hawthorne.