L.A. Earthquake! 11.42 am!

[Asher Kelman]

We were checking the label of our new mattress which has squashed, LOL! Suddenly the floor started to rock and then shake! We'll have to check we have no damage to gas mains!

US Geological Survey reports that the quake was 7.5 miles deep quake 11.42 a.m. Pacific Time. 5.8 on Richter scale in Diamond Bar Chino Hills to Sand Diego and Vegas.

Dishes off the shelves. One guy was moving in his shoes. Our pool water moved with amazing waves. The floor moved in our bedroom.

In the Inland Empire, Banning nr Palm Springs telephone hard line service knocked out. LA city Hall taking a ten minutes break, LOL!

If this had happened in cities with mud or non reinforced homes, there would have been a devastating tragic death toll!

Well we have to wait to see whether or not this is a new fault and hopefully this is not the beginning of a larger series of quakes.

Asher

 

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Wow, glad you are okay. I hope the damage is limited and nothing else wll happen.

Bart

 

[Asher Kelman]

Helicopters from the fire departments and police are surveying damns and flying over communities looking for building damage. The freeways seem to be intact.

Asher

 

[Kathy Rappaport]

Damage coming in....

Boy did we shake pretty good!

Some freeway damage being reported now in Orange County (near Will).
Books and groceries off shelves and kitchens too.
Shaken nerves here in the office and building here
There is a bar next to the office - crowded after the quake to watch the big tv there.

According to the radio, we are having continual aftershocks.

 

[Jim Galli]

Wow! Glad I missed it. I lived in Sylmar in 1971 when the 6.8 quake rocked us for like 40 seconds. That one wrecked stuff because it lasted so long.

 

[Kathy Rappaport]

1971 Sylmar!

Oh..Sylmar - .that one was pretty scary! I watched the powerlines falling outside my bedroom window.

Northridge 1994 - was way worse than Sylmar. I lost all the sheetrock in my house - 2 miles from the epicenter. We had to move out there was so much damage from that quake. It took years to repair most of the San Fernando Valley.

During Sylmar, my crazy photographer friends kidnapped me and decided we should drive out to the Valley from the Westside and take pictures. They didn't get any because we were turned back.

Well the good news is we are all okay. If not shaken up a bit.

 

[Asher Kelman]

So these represent the rest of the fault breaking and adjusting to the initial release of stress.

The magnitude of the original shock re-calibrated to 5.4 on Richter scale. Because soft sediment in L.A. basin allows waves to spread easily, the force was greater in some places distant than epicenter. At epicenter, Chico hill, the rocks were thrust up in the fault of one layer coming over the other. We do not know yet whether or not this is from the San Andreas fault, the mother of all threats to this whole coast, the major subduction zone.

The break in the fault took only a few seconds. Last quake here was 1987.

There's a 5% chance that this quake is a precursor to a more major shake in the next 24 hours. After that it drops to 1%.

The duration of the quake goes up with magnitude of the earthquake and also with the distance from the epicenter. If two jolts are very close together, we are very close to the epicenter!

These natural phenomena should humble us!

Asher

 

[Kathy Rappaport]

Last quake here was 1987.


Asher

Asher -

For Los Angeles Earthquakes - Northridge was in 1994....that was a 6.9 revised to a 6.5 with lots of controversy about the change in size relating to the amount of aid available from FEMA (the agency that oversees disaster aid to Americans)

The last quake in that fault zone was Whittier Narrows Fault in 1987.

 

[Georg R. Baumann]

Glad you folks are all right!

Scarey stuff in deed.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Last quake here was 1987.

Asher -

For Los Angeles Earthquakes - Northridge was in 1994....that was a 6.9 revised to a 6.5 with lots of controversy about the change in size relating to the amount of aid available from FEMA (the agency that oversees disaster aid to Americans)

The last quake in that fault zone was Whittier Narrows Fault in 1987.

What I meant was "there", in Chino Hills, was in 1987, not here in L.A. The 1994 "Northridge Earthquake" hit us like a freight train thundering through our would frame stucco coated fragile house in the Beverly Hills flats 2 blocks from the local primary school.

Just before it started I was woken by the sound of the chandelier swinging. Then the train entered the house. I got out of bed naked and tried to get between the foot of the bed and TV in a massive wooden stand as they wobbled. Just as I passed they came down smashing everything. I called for my kids to get under the doorways. Glass and china crashed. The house stubbornly refused to collapse.

We were safe. The kids were screaming. We hugged them and together went around surveying our home. The air smelled of dust. The floors were covered with glass and broken china. The living room, a two story Spanish-Tudor style beautiful room with hand-painted beams now showed the sky. The massive brick chimney was collapsed outside. My neighbor was screaming at me that I could have killed his wife as that was her bedroom. He demanded I pay for the damage to his roof and remove the chimney from his house! I told him I was so sorry for his house damage, but to blame God not me! Anyway, his wife had been dead for years and the guy must have been plane cuckoo!

Back to my house. The floor had sunk in a slope about 3 inches at one end in the living room. We parked the kids on the street and gave each kid a knife as people on foot and in slow moving old pickup trucks started to prowl the neighborhood. We were worried we might have looters. (The few that arrived were frightened away by the police.) We then went back inside for some more clothes and a radio to find out what was going on with our world.

After that, with the family safe, I went down out street, checking in each house that people were O.K.

The whole thing was a great shock. Nearby, the Santa Monica freeway had come down. Interestingly, it was a conception that the damage was just in the Northridge area where most of the destruction occurred but we were caught in a lesser known fault coming from Wilshire Blvd and going South at the edge of Beverly hills towards Culver City.

So yes, Kathy, I know the earthquake was in 1994, LOL! We will never forget it and how much we treasured each other!

Asher

 

[Kathy Rappaport]

The 10 Fwy

I was in grade school when the built the 10 freeway and took out many of my friends homes by eminent domain. We went to watch them build it right at La Cienega where it went down. Rode their on our bicycles when kids could wander around safe from predators and we left doors unlocked.

There was a wonderful sense of community after the Northridge Quake. At 4:31 am we all ran outside of our condos into the street in Encino. We shared extra shoes and people moved cars into the middle of the street so buildings wouldn't collapse on them waiting for daybreak. We captured stray dogs and watched those of our neighbors. Some were in their night clothes and barefoot. The Boy Scout that I am had just filled up some water containers and had a backpack of emergency supplies and I had them in the front hallway. We had a large Quake in Ludlow - in the 7's about a year prior and me and a few neighbors secured bookcases and made backpacks. We'd been having some smaller quakes and I decided to replace the water. We had a spare set of clothes and shoes. All my dishes, pantry items and kitchen were all over the floor, the curio cabinet down and our tv's on the floor. Our bes, a waterbed, also sprung a slow leak. What a mess. It took me months to go inside to clear out the last of my belongings. I never went back there to live. It was deemed uninhabitable 6 weeks after the quake.

I hope we never experience that again. My grandfather was a survivor of the 1906 San Francisco Quake, the 1932 Long Beach Quake and a 1952 Quake too. Likely, that I will see another one in my lifetime - but scary!

 

[scott kirkpatrick]

Californians and earthquakes

Glad it appears everybody's OK. My brother, a Bay Area resident, was in Candlestick Park the night that San Francisco had its last big one (wasn't that a San Andreas movement?). I recall the Oakland freeway section that dropped in that one caused some grisly fatalities -- they have never rebuilt the two-layer section. All roads OK in the LA area this time?

scott

 

[Asher Kelman]

Thanks Bart, Scott, Jim and everyone else, for the kind thoughts. We do live on an active planet! Nothing is a given. It just so happens that the Californian coast is at the edge of a massive subduction zone from the Pacific Ocean tectonic plates pushing up on this continent. The San Andreas fault has a massive amount of built up stress from this movement and pressure. Sporadic releases give rise to serial earthquake events.

The current quake could be a precursor warning to a more important quake in the next two weeks. We are getting further away from the worst, (24 hour) risk of a new and more massive quake. Only after several weeks will we feel very safe again.

Still there's an 85% chance of a really massive super-quake within the next 30 years.

What's impressive is how well the engineering requirements for building here in California with good inspection has made a 5.8 magnitude quake something one can ride out! Had this occurred in rural China, Iran, Armenia, Turkey or many other places without plywood reinforcement, diagonal torsion bars, bolting down foundations and other reinforcements would have caused massive destruction and loss of life would have occurred would have occurred.

We need economical retrofitting solutions work with existing substandard structures in susceptible communities. Unfortunately these lives are lost when technology could perhaps be available to protect them. Perhaps some genius has already solved the problem of how to protect them too?

Asher

 

[Gary Ayala]

I just came back from inspecting some friend's homes in Brea and my folks and brother's home in Chino. Lots of cracks in drywall seams and around chimneys, but no structural in any of them and these home were maybe five miles from the epicenter.

I had an exclusive contract to clean up and recycle all the earthquak debris in the City of Santa Clarita after the Northridge earthquake. My company did such a good job that we were hired as consultants to clean up the Kobe, Japan earthquake (The Great Hanshin Earhquake).

Modern western construction which incorporates shear walls into the design does amazing well in quakes.

Gary

 

[Michael Fontana]

I'm glad not a big earthquake happend!

Due to heat mining, we had - about a year ago - muliples smaller earthquakes - about 3.8 at Richter; that was scary enough!

 

[Cem_Usakligil]

Here's thinking of you...

Hi Asher, Kathy, Gary, Will and all the others in that area,

Just back home after a very long journey and we've just seen this. It is such bad news on the one hand, but also good on the other since nobody got hurt. We wish you all the luck and a speedy recovery on the financial/material damages. Our thoughts are with you

Kind regards,

Cem & family

 

[Gary Ayala]

Glad it appears everybody's OK. My brother, a Bay Area resident, was in Candlestick Park the night that San Francisco had its last big one (wasn't that a San Andreas movement?). I recall the Oakland freeway section that dropped in that one caused some grisly fatalities -- they have never rebuilt the two-layer section. All roads OK in the LA area this time?

scott

Hey, my father was there that evening as well. Small world.

Gary

 

[Gary Ayala]

Hi Asher, Kathy, Gary, Will and all the others in that area,

Just back home after a very long journey and we've just seen this. It is such bad news on the one hand, but also good on the other since nobody got hurt. We wish you all the luck and a speedy recovery on the financial/material damages. Our thoughts are with you

Kind regards,

Cem & family

Morning Cem --- too bad you missed this one. You would have had some good stories to tell. So far nobody has been hurt and no real property damage ... lots of patching and painting, lots of sweeping up of glass ... but no real structural damage.

Tough and enforced building standards and a smallish quake = minor damage.

Gary

 

[Kathy Rappaport]

Just a reminder

Just a reminder that we live in the rock and roll capitol....
And certainly not a huge economic toll but maybe a bit of emotional since everyone I know is a bit on edge. ..just enough to keep everyone on their toes and prepared for a bigger one.

 

[janet Smith]

everyone I know is a bit on edge. ..just enough to keep everyone on their toes and prepared for a bigger one

Sorry to hear about this, here's hoping you don't get anymore, thinking of you all.....

 

[Asher Kelman]

Sorry to hear about this, here's hoping you don't get anymore, thinking of you all.....

Hi Janet,

We need to put this into perspective against the massive Chinese earthquake May 12th this year, that devastated Eastern Sichuan Province with a 7.8 magnitude quake of the Richter scale.

After all the news of the destruction with some 70,000 people dead, there was a lot of reports about corruption of building standards.

Parents are angry at the ease with which some schools collapsed

Now, one man is now reported to be facing re-education by labor for daring to put a photograph on the web.

The scenes were devastating. Some videos are here.


"Satellite images of the Beichuan area of Sichuan, released by Taiwan's National Space Organisation in the days after the 12 May earthquake, showed huge landslides.
The river running down from the mountains and through the devastated town of Beichuan was blocked by earth (seen as brown). Roads were covered and buildings swept away." (Source, BBC News)

Blacked rivers formed massive lakes. Read the entire excellent report by the BBC, here.

Asher