March 28, 2014 La Habra 5.1 earthquake

Wow, has it REALLY been 3 months since I posted on my blog? Its not because I don't have anything to share, but usually because I just take the path of least resistance and post it on Facebook, where it gets difficult to find and retrieve after a week or so. I should post more on here and then link to it from FB.

At 9:09pm last night, just as I was returning home from home teaching and walking in the front door, Kim and I felt the house start to creak and wiggle. Kim said our flat screen TV was shaking. A few pictures on our walls were crooked, but we sustained no other damage. I immediately went to our laundry room and turned on my ham radio and announced myself as monitoring. I was soon joined by one or two dozen other hams from our stake reporting in.

The TV news stations quickly downgraded the quake from an initial magnitude 5.3 to a 5.1 shallow quake in La Habra, a distance of about 12 miles or so northwest of us in northwest Orange County. Quakes larger than magnitude 5 are considered to be moderate quakes. Although the much larger 6.5 Big Bear and 7.3 Landers quakes in 1992, 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994, and the 7.1 Hector Mine quake in 1999 quakes all felt stronger, this was the closest  earthquake of at least moderate size since the 5.9 magnitude Whittier Narrows quake way back in 1987.

USGS summary info

There have been no reports of deaths or serious injuries; however, I'm fairly sure there were people with bare feet who sustained injuries from walking on broken glass. There were reports of damaged buildings and destroyed property, such as masonry walls and broken main water pipes.There was a report that the garage door at one Fullerton fire station was jammed in the closed position and would not open. There was a rock slide in Carbon Canyon that resulted in an overturned car. Some apartments and homes suffered structural damage, such as detracked garage doors or collapsed chimneys. A few were so badly damaged that they had to be red tagged and the occupants evacuated.

Bob LaBarge who is in charge of LDS emergency communication for the LDS Orange County Emergency Response, reported that the lead ham net control for the Fullerton Stake was returning from business travel and their stake president was personally impacted by the quake and was therefore unable to coordinate their emergency response. This is a valuable lesson that disasters don't necessarily happen at a convenient time and place where all trained resources will be available to help implement an emergency response plan. Therefore its vital to have sufficient numbers of adequately trained people who can fill in when someone else is absent.

Here are some photos off the Internet of damage from this quake. Click on the thumbnail image to view the full size photo.