Dozens of small to
moderate earthquakes
struck southeastern California on Sunday, knocking trailer homes off
their foundations, shattering windows and rattling nerves in a small
farming town east of San Diego.
The largest quake, at 1:57 p.m., registered at a magnitude 5.5 and was centered about three miles northwest of the town of Brawley, said Robert Graves, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Another quake about an hour and a half earlier registered at magnitude 5.3.
No injuries were reported.
More
than 30 additional earthquakes with magnitudes of at least 3.5 jiggled
the same area near the southern end of the Salton Sea, Graves said.
"The type of activity that we're seeing could possibly continue for several hours or even days," Graves said.
The
quakes pushed 20 mobile homes at a trailer park off their foundations,
displacing the families that lived in them, said Maria Peinado, a
spokeswoman for the Imperial County Emergency Operations Center.
Sporadic power outages affecting 2,500 Imperial Irrigation District customers also prompted authorities to evacuate some patients from one of the county's two hospitals.
By late Sunday, a magnitude-5.1 quaked followed by several more with magnitudes of at least 4.0 shook the area.
"We're
all on edge here," said George Nava, the mayor of Brawley, a town of
25,000. "It's not uncommon for us to have earthquakes out here, but at
this frequency and at this magnitude it's fairly unusual."
At the El Sol Market in Brawley, food packages fell from shelves and littered the aisles.
Several
glasses and a bottle of wine crashed to the floor and shattered at
Assaggio, an Italian restaurant in Brawley, said owner Jerry Ma. The
shaking was short-lived but intense, he said.
"It
felt like there was quake every 15 minutes. One after another. My kids
are small and they're scared and don't want to come back inside," said
Mike Patel, who manages Townhouse Inn & Suites in Brawley.
A TV came crashing down and a few light fixtures broke inside the motel, Patel said.
A Brawley police dispatcher said several downtown buildings sustained minor damage.
The first quake,
with a magnitude of 3.9, occurred at 10:02 a.m. The USGS said more than
100 aftershocks struck the same approximate epicenter, about 16 miles
north of El Centro.
Some
shaking was felt along the San Diego County coast in Del Mar, some 120
miles from the epicenter, as well as in the Coachella Valley, southern
Orange County and parts of northern Mexico.
USGS seismologist Lucy Jones said earthquake swarms are characteristic of the region, known as the Brawley Seismic Zone.
"The
area sees lots of events at once, with many close to the largest
magnitude, rather than one main shock with several much smaller
aftershocks," Jones said.
The last major swarm was in 2005, following a magnitude-5.1 quake, she said.
Sunday's
quake cluster occurred in what scientists call a transition zone
between the Imperial and San Andreas faults, so they weren't assigning
the earthquakes to either fault, Graves said.
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