If you've been in California long enough (we've been here 36+ years) one of the things that everyone does when they first feel an earthquake is to immediately look at your watch, particularly if it's one of those "rolling sea-wave style" quakes that
itsmoked described, and you start to count off the seconds. If things stop moving within five seconds or so, you can relax as it was a 'small one', but if it gets to 10 seconds you start looking around to where you're at and start to contemplate whether there might be some place close by where it might be safer to be, like standing in a door frame or under something more than substantial than just the ceiling of your house or office. The 'big one' is going feel like a 'small one' for the first five seconds or so but from there the 'curve' moves-up logarithmic-ally.
The strongest quake that I've experienced personally was the Northridge quake in 1994. Now we were about 45 miles from the epicenter but it was still a pretty good shake. Our two oldest sons had an apartment about another 10 miles closer and they had actual damage like kitchen cabinets breaking loose from the ceiling and bigger things falling over. We only had maybe one picture fall over and no real damage except a few cracks in the ceiling that got a bit more noticeable.
As for the frequency of quakes here in SoCal, it's a daily event, just that you don't feel most of them. Note that I also have a 'quake' app on my iPhone that keeps me up-to-date in almost real time (I get a 'message' type notice for any event over 3.0 that hits anywhere in California).
As of this moment, here's what's been happening locally for the last few days:
Note that Yellow squares are within the last week and the Blue ones in the last 24 hours. There were no Red ones, which would have been in the last hour. Also, the size of the squares indicate the magnitude. Everything you see on that map was less than a 2.0 (for the record, we live just above the first 'a' in 'Santa Ana' on that map). The 'red lines' on that map are the KNOWN faults.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
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