Second powerful quake in 2 days hits Southern California

By David Villafranca Los Angeles —  A 7.1-magnitude earthquake shook Southern California Friday night following the 6.4-magnitude temblor on the previous day, which together are the two biggest seismic movements to hit the state in recent decades.

California authorities said that neither of the two quakes, nor the hundreds of aftershocks of greater or lesser intensity that followed them, left any victims.

The epicenter of Friday’s temblor was around Ridgecrest, a city of some 29,000 inhabitants located 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Los Angeles, which was already the scene of what is now known as “the 4th of July earthquake,” since it coincided with Independence Day celebrations in the United States.

The intensity of the new quake, which struck at 8:19 pm, shook millions of people in cities from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

The greatest material damage occurred in Ridgecrest and its surroundings, though by good fortune the epicenter of the temblors hit a sparsely populated rural region of California.

Nonetheless, the earthquake in the Ridgecrest area, still shaken by the Thursday quake, caused several buildings to catch fire, rocks to fall on highways, electricity cuts, gas and water escapes, and telecommunications problems.

“We do feel like there is damage but we don’t know the extent of it yet,” Kern County fire chief David Witt told a press conference Saturday.

“Nobody was trapped, no major collapses that we know of. But we’re out there searching,” he said.

For his part, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement that he has asked President Donald Trump to declare a state of emergency so that federal aid arrives faster and more efficiently to the affected areas.

Experts have already said after the “4th of July earthquake” that there will probably be others of the same or greater magnitude.

“So the M6.4 was a foreshock. This was a M7.1 on the same fault as has been producing the Searles Valley sequence. This is part of the same sequence,” tweeted seismologist Lucy Jones of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a renowned authority in the study of earthquakes.

“Yes, we estimate that there’s about a 1 in 10 chance that Searles Valley will see another M7. That is a 9 in 10 chance that tonight’s M7.1 was the largest,” the seismologist said.

The temblor was felt with less intensity in cities like Las Vegas, where, however, several basketball games of the NBA’s Summer League were canceled.

On the other hand, the baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres was not interrupted despite the earthquake, and organist Dieter Ruehle, who adds his music to the games at Dodger Stadium, improvised almost instantly after the temblor the Carole King song “I Feel the Earth Move.”

After several years without any serious earthquakes in California, this series of telluric movements is one of the worst experienced in recent decades in a state known for its seismic activity and which is crossed, among others, by the San Andreas Fault.

None of the temblors this time was related to the San Andreas Fault.

The most tragic earthquake in recent history and one that is still remembered by many Californians occurred in Northridge in 1994, a magnitude-6.7 quake in the Los Angeles metropolitan area that left 57 people dead, thousands injured and vast material damage.

Earthquake authorities and experts have long been warning about the “Big One,” which is what they call a hypothetical and possibly devastating earthquake that will originate in the San Andreas Fault, and which could have grave consequences for California. EFE-EPA

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