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Cityscape of Los Angeles | Representative image: Wikimedia Commons
A magnitude 4.4 earthquake was felt from the Los Angeles area to San Diego. Buildings swayed, dishes rattled and car alarms went off, but no major damage or injuries were initially reported.
The epicenter of Monday’s quake was near the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, about 6.5 miles northeast of Los Angeles City Hall and about 7.5 miles below the Earth’s surface, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The quake was felt from Los Angeles south to San Diego and east to the desert region of Palm Springs, according to the USGS community reporting page. A small number of reports were filed from the southern San Joaquin Valley, about 100 miles northwest of LA.
A hospital building shook, a live interview on ESPN was interrupted and the ground shook in Anaheim, home to Disneyland in Orange County. Dishes clattered in LA’s historic Laurel Canyon neighborhood, home to many celebrities, and photos on social media showed shampoo bottles and other items littering the floor of an LA Target store.
Television helicopters showed water pouring from an upper floor of Pasadena City Hall, an ornate domed structure built in 1927 that was retrofitted to be earthquake-proof in the 2000s. Pasadena Public Information Officer Lisa Derderian confirmed the water leak was caused by the earthquake. About 200 employees were safely evacuated from City Hall, and one person was rescued from an elevator, she said.
There was no obvious damage to the century-old Rose Bowl in Pasadena, but an engineer will do a full assessment, Derderian said. There was no immediate assessment of the city’s 1927 Central Library, which closed in 2021 for an upcoming earthquake renovation. “We haven’t gone in to look at it,” she said.
Firefighters from all 106 Los Angeles stations surveyed the 470-square-mile city and found no significant damage, spokeswoman Margaret Stewart said in a statement.
The quake was more of a reminder of what can happen in a state where a large population lives above active fault lines.
“I lived through the Northridge earthquake (magnitude 6.7 in 1994) and today’s quake reminded me of the rules that save lives in an earthquake: lie down, take cover and hold on,” said Kathryn Barger, Los Angeles County Executive. It was also a reminder to all of us that we live in an earthquake zone and need to be prepared.
The National Weather Service said a tsunami was not expected, and the USGS revised its original magnitude estimate of the quake downward from 4.6.
Richard Egan was eating lunch with colleagues on the second floor of an office building near Long Beach Airport, about 20 miles south of the earthquake’s epicenter, when there was a sudden tremor.
It became very quiet, he said, and we waited for a bigger quake.
He estimated it rolled for about 45 seconds, but when it stopped shaking, the lunchtime conversation continued where it left off, said Egan, who has experienced many earthquakes in his 59 years living in Southern California. He classified this quake as average.
The quake struck on the first day of the new school year and affected 540,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Many schools felt the quake, and at least one high school, John Marshall in Los Feliz, alerted parents that they had evacuated the buildings to check for damage but did not immediately discover any.
“We have not received any reports of injuries or significant damage to our facilities,” District Manager Alberto M. Carvalho said in a social media post.
The quake came less than a week after a magnitude 5.2 earthquake struck Southern California and was also widely felt in Los Angeles. There were no injuries or major damage in that quake.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been edited by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First published: August 13, 2024 | 6:30 a.m. IS
