Southern California was shaken by an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.4. The main tremor was in San Bernardino County and it was widely felt around the region as many prepared to celebrate Independence Day on Thursday.
According to Reuters, the preliminary 6.6 temblors hit about 10:33 a.m. and centered in the Mojave Desert in Searles Valley, about 11 miles east northeast of Ridgecrest, about 109 miles north of San Bernardino and 121 miles northeast of Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
It was proceeded by magnitude 4.2 temblor that shook the area about 30 minutes before the large quake, seismologist Lucy Jones said on Twitter, calling the earlier tremor a foreshock.
A short time after the 6.4 earthquakes, aftershocks measuring 4.7, 4.2, 3.8 and 3.5 hit the same area, USGS reported.
The epicenter is within the sprawling Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake, where a desert test range is located.
The quake was not on the major San Andreas fault but on strike-slip fault in “an area with a lot of little faults but no long fault,” famed seismologist Lucy Jones said on Twitter.
The area had a lot of quakes larger than magnitude 5.0 in the 1980s, she added.
Thursday’s shaking, which registered in the Los Angeles area as a long, rolling motion, and lasted for at least 20 seconds. It was felt as far north as Visalia and as far south as Oceanside, according to USGS’s website.
No injuries were immediately reported, but the San Bernardino County Fire Department tweeted that buildings and roads have been damaged in Trona, a remote community located about 10 miles northeast of Ridgecrest. The extent of the damages was not immediately known.
In Ridgecrest, the Kern County Fire Department was responding to nearly two dozen incidents, everything from structure fires to medical assistance, officials said. Search and rescue teams were headed to the area.
No damage was immediately reported in Los Angeles, though the city’s Fire Department went on earthquake mode in the wake of the temblor.
Thursday’s earthquake was the largest to hit Southern California in nearly 20 years, when a magnitude 7.1 quake struck the Hector Mine area, nearly 50 miles east-southeast of Barstow, in October 1999, according to Jones.
And it was the second largest in the region since the catastrophic 6.6 Northridge quake devastated the region in 1994, killing dozens of people and causing billions of dollars in damages.
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