California LJ rollcall?

[annathepiper]

Okay, I've seen boxer_ferret and hederahelix report in that they just felt the quake down there and that they're okay--how about the rest of the Californians on my Friends list, or who might otherwise be reading my journal? Sing out, folks! Let us know you're okay down there! I've just read a couple of articles that say that this is actually the third quake to rattle California since Sunday, not the second, so I'm just a wee bit nervous. O.o

Comments

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Didn't feel a thing up here. 5.whatever quakes aren't all that big.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Yeah, 5.something is nothing to worry about unless you're, say, in a brick building at the epicenter.

[boxer-ferret.livejournal.com]

Oh, this one couldn't have caused much damage. The last one in Anza that was very similar only cause a few cracks in some concrete at the most. The people in the Palm Springs and that whole general desert area are the ones to get any damage and these magnitude 4 or 5 quakes only cause a few cracks and shake the contents on the shelves at convenience stores that you see on the security camera videos they show on the news.

[firni.livejournal.com]

It was just my mother-in-law rolling over on the couch, calm down YAWL.

[firni.livejournal.com]

I was going to express the hope that the epicenter was my mother-in-law's place of employment, but she works graveyard so NEVER MIND.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

I should point out that I didn't mean this to sound as snarky as it may have, it's just native Californians are probably much more blase about earthquakes than most other folks and will thus say things like "it's not even a six? Might as well have been a truck rolling by!" I think it's great to be concerned about people, what I meant to suggest was more along the lines of "it wasn't severe enough for you to need to worry at all."

Also, of the three, the two are by LA were fairly small, and the largeish one was way up by the oregon border, off tho coast, something like 800 miles away and most likely unrelated.

[otoselkie.livejournal.com]

Which part of California? (I've got relitives in Santa Cruz and San Fransisco).

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Yucaipa (http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/ca/index.html), east of LA.

[annathepiper]

*nods* The part that worried me was not the magnitude of the quakes per se, but the fact that there have been three of them since Sunday, which struck me as unusual. I don't know enough about the science of this stuff to know if this is actually notable, though, or what.

[annathepiper]

As I just mentioned to emmacrew elsewhere on the thread, it ain't the magnitude specifically that worries me, but the fact that there have been three of them so far this week. JUST enough to make me a touch nervous. Thanks for checking in though. :) Glad to hear you are unrattled!

[annathepiper]

*nodnod* Not so much worried about the magnitude per se as the frequency... since this is the third quake that's happened this week, I'm mostly curious (and a touch nervous) about whether this is par for the course in terms of earthquakes or what?

[annathepiper]

Here is an article about the quake on our local paper's news site.

[annathepiper]

*snicker*

[casirafics.livejournal.com]

Even I get a bit blasé that way -- once when I was a kid and we had a 5-something earthquake up here in Seattle, my family started mercilessly mocking the endless news coverage about the virtual non-event, since damage was minimal but the reporters were obsessed. I went running around the house looking for any signs of anything that had possibly tipped over; when I finally found a figurine knocked over in my bedroom, I started waving my arms in triumph and shouting, "Earthquake damage! I found earthquake damage!!"

I was a strange and silly person. *grin*

Of course, you take the flippancy when you can get it. Having been through a 6.8, too, I'm not terribly anxious to repeat that experience any time soon. ;) And so I always worry and want to check to be sure people are okay, too. Earthquakes can be so capricious....

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Yeah. These things are happening all the time, but usually they're so small they hardly even register to most people. Larger ones this close to each other aren't that abnormal, either - often, a series of semi-large ones will come as aftershocks to the first.

Just the usual stress-reducing plate activity.

Have you ever looked up the types of quakes that happen, what makes them different, and the effect they have on the earth? I could give you a link, if not.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

If memory serves, it's not too unusual to have a few smallish ones within a few days of each other along the same faultline as stuff settles around. Besides the aftershocks, that is.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Loma Prieta was... scary. My roomie and were in the living room of our sublet in Berkeley trying to figure out where a doorway we could get to without going too close to the glassed-in dining area was, and the grand piano moved. We did make it to the kitchen door and stood there together. Our minds must have been going lickety-split, because we were in the doorway probably halfway through the main quake itself, and I seem to remember a lot of dithering and discussion about where we were going to go.

[boxer-ferret.livejournal.com]

I did suspect that the major quake that caused the tsunami disaster in the east could lead to other quakes on the Pacific rim. It could be a sign of something bigger to come or it could just be a series of smaller quakes to take the place of one big disaster. I sure don't know.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suspect all of the ones from June 11 through today on this page (http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/ca/archives.html) that start with "1415" are all pretty much the same geological event.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

I believe this (http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/ca/STORE/X2281854/ciim_display.html) was yours from a few years ago.

[blueirish.livejournal.com]

My family just called from down south to see if I was alright. Which is nice since I didn't even feel the quake this time. SO all is good on my part of the CA coast.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

Today's quake was the second one this week that I felt. I felt the Sunday one. But, today's was MUCH stronger because it was closer to where I lived.

I had to actually grab for bookcases cause they were swaying so much. This one was kinda scary.

[annathepiper]

Glad to hear it! Thank you for checking in. :)

[annathepiper]

Eee, I can bet! I still vividly remember the one we had up here in the Seattle area in 2001--just big enough to be just a bit scary. Glad to hear from you, though. :)

[annathepiper]

Whoa, cool. Thanks for the link!

[annathepiper]

Cool--and I see that list has a bunch of much smaller quakes reported, as well. I wonder what event set them all off.

(This is all science-geeky-interesting to me! Like the data on volcanic eruptions. Not that I know squat about this stuff, but I'm still all 'ooooo cool'. :) )

[annathepiper]

I'll take for "series of smaller and non-damaging quakes", please!

("Cake or death?" "Um... cake, please!" "At this rate we'll be all out of cake!" -- Eddie Izzard)

[annathepiper]

WOW. The piano moved? That had to have been unnerving, indeed. I was disturbed enough by the little rattles that hit the Attachmate building in 2001, without having a big heavy object like a piano moving around!

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

wrog has a good friend from grad school who is a geophysicsist. So I get some explanations through that path, and then there's just the "stuff you learn growing up in earthquake country" thing in the background. I agree it's super-interesting and I wish I knew more, too.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was the thing that stuck in my mind the most. It shifted about three inches over and then back again, a full sized concert grand (we were subletting from a pianist who had gone off to get a master's degree for a couple of years). We also had a fishtank tsunami. I think only one or two things fell and got damaged in our place, though. Later that evening one of the neighbors was being "helpful" and turned the gas off (it had been fine, no breaks, and we'd even used it to cook dinner). It took several days to get the gas company out to turn it back on, because it was understandably a fairly low priority. So we had no stove, no hot water. We were eating stuff that could be cooked in a toaster oven and a rice cooker, and showering in the dressing room backstage at the music department's concert hall. That was a bit annoying, but really nothing compared to the loss and devastation in other areas.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Also, I love the did you feel it (http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/pnw/index.html) page. I respond after every quake I'm in the area for. One morning I thought I felt something at 3 am, and Roger hadn't, so when I got up, I checked, and sure enough! It's nice to confirm smaller ones, or else rule them out as "it really was just a big truck going by." ;-)

[wrog]

in the Nisqually quake, our piano was playing itself -- not entirely sure whether it was the hammers bumping up of their own accord or stuff falling on the keyboard, but was still pretty creepy, either way.

[annathepiper]

I was here for the earthquake in 2001, and that was plenty scary. Hey, I'm an earthquake newbie, what can I say? ;)

It sounds like the local news folks are even wackier about earthquakes than they are about thunderstorms. solarbird and I were stunned to discover, after moving out here from Kentucky, that thunder actually made the news!

[annathepiper]

I have not looked this stuff up, no! I have some vague niggling memory of being told how the various plates of the earth work in geology class in school, but that was of course tailored down to schoolkids, and it was in Kentucky to boot. Not exactly earthquake country, and not exactly a shining, stellar example of an in-depth educational system either. :)

Hit me with linkage!

[annathepiper]

Okay. :) This seems in keeping with the data on the links flashfire's been winging me, and now that I think about it, it seems in keeping as well with the page I saw once measuring seismic activity at Mount Rainier. I think I remember being startled at how many earthquake readings they actually got--of teeny tiny earthquakes.

[annathepiper]

Nifty, about knowing a geophysicist! I rank this stuff as only slightly less science-geeky-cool than astronomical phenomena--I'm totally grooving on this news that a rocky planet has been discovered out there, for example. :)

So much to know, and hardly any time to absorb it all!

[annathepiper]

Man. Just seeing the piano move alone would have been quite the vivid thing to get stuck into my memory. Bummer about the gas, though I'm glad that you and yours got through it all reasonably unscathed. :)

[annathepiper]

Definitely a cool sort of page! flashfire showed me another link that had counts of how many reports had come in on given quakes, which is also a cool datapoint.

[annathepiper]

Yow. I can imagine that'd have been creepy, yeah!