Southern California has rocked a 6.4-magnitude earthquake, which is its largest earthquake in two decades on Thursday, even as the United States celebrated its July 4 Independence Day holiday.
The earthquake caused “substantial damage” at a military facility but otherwise only minor injuries in the sparsely populated area, Bernama News reported.
The earthquake was followed by dozens of aftershocks, struck in the Mojave Desert 10 kilometers from the small city of Ridgecrest at 10:33 am.
The shallow quake was felt 160 miles away in Los Angeles and even as far afield as Las Vegas in the neighboring state of Nevada.
The area “will continue having a lot of aftershocks,” some maybe as strong as magnitude five, California Institute of Technology seismologist Lucy Jones told a press conference.
Although the quake in the most populous US state of California revived fears of the “Big One” — a powerful tremor along the San Andreas Fault that could devastate major cities in Southern California — President Trump was quick to reassure that this wasn’t it.
“All seems to be very much under control!” he tweeted two hours after the quake in the Searles Valley of San Bernardino County.
Thursday’s epicenter was in or on the edge of the US Navy’s sprawling desert bomb testing range known as China Lake. The quake struck at a depth of 10.7 kilometers in the vast desert region.
An official at China Lake said there was “substantial damage” to their facilities, including fires, water leaks and spills of hazardous materials.
David Witt, the fire chief in Kern County which includes Ridgecrest,
reported “minor, minor injuries,” stemming from broken glass and shelves falling down in supermarkets.
The San Bernardino County Fire Department said that “buildings and roads have sustained varying degrees of damage.”
This included “buildings with minor cracks, broken water mains, power lines down, rock slides on certain roads.”
The earthquake was the largest in Southern California since 1999 when a 7.1-magnitude quake struck the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base, according to The Los Angeles Times.
