5.8 quake shakes Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A strong earthquake shook Southern California on Tuesday, causing buildings to sway and triggering some precautionary evacuations. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
The jolt was felt from Los Angeles to San Diego, and slightly in Las Vegas.

The 11:42 a.m. quake was initially estimated at 5.8 but was revised downward to magnitude-5.4, said seismologist Kate Hutton of the U.S. Geological Survey office in Pasadena. More than a dozen aftershocks quickly followed, the largest estimated at magnitude-3.8.


QUAKE: Centered near Chino Hills, felt in San Diego, Vegas
U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY: Earthquake details
YOUR REPORT: Tell and show us what you see and hear

The quake was centered 29 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles near the San Bernardino County city of Chino Hills, and the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the quake was about 8 milesbelow the earth's surface.

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"It will certainly cause cracked plaster and broken windows, but probably not structural damage," Hutton said.

The magnitude-5.9 Whittier Narrows quake in 1987 was the last big shake in that area. That quake heavily damaged older buildings and houses in communities east of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey said there were no immediate reports of damage or injury in Los Angeles. San Bernardino and San Diego counties also had no immediate reports of damage.

Buildings swayed in downtown Los Angeles for several seconds.

Workers quickly evacuated some office buildings.

"It was dramatic. The whole building moved and it lasted for a while," said Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore, who was in the sheriff's suburban Monterey Park headquarters east of Los Angeles.

California is one of the world's most seismically active regions. More than 300 faults crisscross the state, which sits atop two of Earth's major tectonic plates, the Pacific and North American plates. About 10,000 quakes each year rattle Southern California alone, although most of them are too small to be felt.

As strongly as it was felt, the quake was far less powerful than the magnitude-6.7 Northridge earthquake that badly damaged the region on Jan. 17, 1994. That quake was the last damaging temblor in Southern California. It killed 72 people, injured more than 9,000 and caused $25 billion in damage in the metropolitan area.

No electrical outages were reported in Los Angeles due to the quake, said Department of Water and Power spokeswoman Kim Hughes.

In Orange County, about 2,000 detectives were attending a conference on gangs at a Marriott hotel in Anaheim when a violent jolt shook the main conference room.

Mike Willever, who was at the hotel, said, "First we heard the ceiling shaking, then the chandelier started to shake, then there was a sudden movement of the floor."

Chris Watkins, from San Diego, said he previously felt several earthquakes, but "that was one of the worst ones."

Delegates and guests at a cluster of hotels near the Disneyland resort spilled into the streets immediately after the quake.

The damage created by an earthquake depends greatly on where it hits. A 7.1 quake — much stronger than Northridge — hit the Mojave Desert in 1999 but caused only a few injuries and no deaths.
Source: USA Today