Mild Quake Hits LA; Media Goes Nuts

I've ridden through 6-7 in both Northern and Southern California.

This is not the Big One, nor demonstrated to be a foreshock of the Big One.

Yeah I've been through the 6-7 range too. Now Loma Preita in 89, that was a shaker.

This one, entertaining but hardly a major deal

It was fun, though, years ago in my dorm, with all the women running through in their underwear when the building would start swaying when an earthquake struck. (San Diego)

I went through some big ones in the Bay Area, was in LA in 1989 (news was interrupted and Loma Prieta was definitely big news). The quake affecting me the most wasn't one of the biggest but it was nasty -- Whittier. At work the lights went out and tiles and metal vents fell down from high (12+ foot) ceilings; people had items stacked high above their desks and all these toppled over -- again, with the lights out. (no windows)

That's an earthquake.

I feel sorry for the colleague who had just moved there to LA with her husband from the UP (Michigan). A mild quake hit us the first week she was there, too.

California will never fall into the ocean, it's a slip fault that's traveling north. Someday LA will be up by Alaska not a new neighbor of Atlantis. :)

The quakes here in Utah are smaller 1 to 2 on the scale, you hardly feel them. A 5 seems scary to me! The Wasatch fault is actually quite active but just small scale quakes luckily. Utah is so ill prepared we're screwed if we got a big one.

I was just sitting down at my favorite ramen noodle place for some lunch when it hit. It was the "wavy" kind , lots of "flex" & no jolts - just the kind I don't mind. Well....sorta don't.

Earthquake survivor here.

Actually I was on the 10 when it hit. I lost radio reception for a few seconds and that was about it.

Though when I got to mu office I found that an open box of Hot Tamales had tipped over and spilled.

The horror.....the horror.

I slept through a 5.4 temblor in Hawaii...then again TV media has become a bunch of hysterical hens....

"TV media has become a bunch of hysterical hens"

Sensationalist fools -- in Seattle on Inauguration Day we had a very severe wind storm. (Many of us joked that God was punishing us for having elected the Clintons.) It was a serious storm; there were deaths. In 1995, another wind storm was forecast. I remember the teevee (of which I still watched a little each week, mainly C-SPAN) and the local news station that hyped from the morning onward "Windstorm [sic] '95" and had a guy in his slicker up in the Space Needle and when just the slightest breeze happened, he shouted and grabbed the fencing at the edge of the observation platform. What stupid hype.

"I live in California and have been through 5 range quakes. Yeah, it’s a good shaking, you might need to do a little clean-up of fallen books, you might even see some cracked plaster. But that’s about it."

Well that's certainly true, but what I never know is how big will the quake be. Do things just rattle? And when they start to fall off the shelves, will that be it or will the walls start buckling and the place start tumbling down. Not knowing how severe an earthquake will be is the scary part for me.

But once an earthquake is over you breathe a sigh of relief and life goes on.

The media reaction just shows how much they overhype any event they think they can get a little mileage out of.