High-Rises Sway as Twin Quakes Rattle Southland

Two brief but intense earthquakes whipsawed across central Los Angeles County within 25 minutes of each other Monday morning, causing cosmetic damage to buildings, triggering precautionary evacuations of schools and some offices and slightly injuring two people.

The quake was felt across much of the Southland, with worried residents from as far south as San Clemente calling local police and fire officials, but no significant damage was reported in Orange County.

The initial quake and its aftershock were almost equally strong. Caltech seismologist Kate Hutton said the first shock, at 9:57 a.m., had a magnitude of 4.5, and lasted about five seconds. The second, at 10:22 a.m., registered a magnitude of 4.3.

Both were along the same Elysian Park Fault line responsible for the 5.9 Whittier quake in October, 1987, that killed three people and caused about $360 million in damage.

The epicenter was fixed eight miles beneath Montebello. The twin jolts wrenched the city especially hard along the spine of the deep-seated Elysian Park Fault, which extends from Whittier through East Los Angeles, downtown, Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.

Hutton said it was “uncommon, but not rare” for similar-size quakes to occur so closely, and added that it presaged “a continuing series of small aftershocks.” Jones said only a 1% to 2% chance remains that the quakes were foreshocks of a larger quake within the next two days.

Monday’s main quake was the sixth temblor of magnitude 4.5 or greater in the immediate Los Angeles area in less than two years--the most in such a time period since detailed records began 60 years ago, according to Lucile Jones of the U.S. Geological Survey. Five of those have been along various parts of the Elysian Park Fault, which was unknown until two years ago.

Despite the usual unnerving accompaniment of splintering glass, cracking plaster, cascading ceiling tiles and jangling burglar alarms, the quakes’ toll on people and property was slight.

But at least two minor casualties were recorded: a woman at a downtown court building, hit by a falling acoustic ceiling tile, and a Ward Elementary School student in Downey who, in her zeal to follow safety measures, banged her head as she dived under her desk, and needed stitches to close the cut over her eye.

The woman, identified as Cecilia Ortega, 42, of West Covina, was hit by an acoustic tile from the sixth-floor hallway ceiling of the Superior Courts building. She was treated for back and neck pain at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan and released Monday afternoon.

In downtown Los Angeles, the shakers set high-rises swaying. Some of 475 construction workers at the 73-story Library Tower--still under construction and the tallest building on the West Coast, built to withstand an 8.3 quake--scrambled to watch from a parking lot as the tower swayed “noticeably” after the shaking stopped.

For drywall worker Don Shephard, who stayed put on the 65th floor, 850 feet up, it was lively as a carnival ride: “It was a thrill. . . . I rather enjoyed it.”

The city’s emergency operations center was open for only 90 minutes; there was little for them to do after initial damage assessments. Inspections and helicopter flyovers by government agencies and utilities found the area’s systems--highways, bridges, dams and electricity, gas and water facilities--undamaged. A supervisor working in a 60-foot-deep Metro Rail tunnel downtown said he thought only that “a big bus or truck came by.”

Many telephones in Montebello, the epicenter, were out for well over an hour.

Evacuations were precautionary, and brief. About 2,500 people were moved out of the State Office Building downtown for about two hours. The 22 downtown Municipal Courts and city halls in Montebello, Downey and Compton were evacuated while buildings were examined.

A Dash to Exits

One unintended evacuation: About 50 people at a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors budget hearing, who, in spite of Supervisor Kenneth Hahn’s urgings to “stay calm, everybody,” sprinted for the exits when the quake shook loose some ceiling tiles.

Hundreds of thousands of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District followed earthquake drill procedures, spending an hour or so out on athletic fields and playgrounds. Downey and Montebello students were also sent outside briefly, district officials reported.

At Breed Elementary School in East Los Angeles, it was the second jolt, not the first, that terrified. Children were out on the playground when it struck, and many hit the ground. Several youngsters began crying, “Not again . . . not this again.” A fifth-grader fainted and was revived after about 10 minutes.

And about 30 parents, many of them survivors of killer earthquakes in El Salvador and Nicaragua, descended on the school to take their children home. “At least I’ll know that my child is with me at home,” said Avelina Molina, signing papers allowing her 9-year-old daughter to go home. “I trust the school (officials) but they have no control over what God orders.”

Monday’s quake was not felt nearly as sharply in Orange County as an April 7 temblor centered under Newport Beach of 4.6 intensity. That quake rattled through much of the central county, cracked buildings, caused several school closings and frightened even natives because of the severity of its shaking.

The memory of that jolt was on the minds of some local residents Monday. Todd Wulffson, a lawyer with the firm O’Melveny & Myers, was in his 17th-floor office in Newport Beach when the quake hit.

“I’ve got this big old desk, and it moved sideways,” Wulffson said. “Everything kind of moves back and forth when the Santa Ana winds blow and during earthquakes. . . . We’re kind of used to them by now--that’s what’s scary.”

Marilee Miller, acting manager of the Emergency Management Division, the county’s disaster nerve center, said no damage was reported from the quake and its aftershocks. But as a precaution, county officials activated the emergency broadcast system and issued a bulletin to local radio stations announcing that a quake had occurred.

In Fullerton, a woman who tried to shut off the natural gas line to her house after the quake got more than she bargained for.

When Nancy Johnson rushed outside of her home in the 1300 block of West Ash Avenue to turn off the gas, the valve came off, causing a loud pop that could be heard for several blocks. As gas spewed into the air, neighbors left their homes and gas company workers and firefighters rushed to the scene to plug the valve and make repairs.

“There were no injuries, no fire and no damage,” Fullerton city spokeswoman Sylvia Palmer said.

Across the Southland, residents and businesses reported the standard recitation of inanimate casualties that accompany such moderate-size shakers: A fallen wine rack and “the usual jars of pickles” at a Vons market in El Monte; broken windows at a video store and shoe store along Brooklyn Avenue in East Los Angeles, at a Bank of America building downtown, and at a gas company building in Pico Rivera; a high school classroom trailer off its base in Downey; a slight earthslide on Soto Street in El Sereno.

A tractor-trailer rig eastbound on the San Bernardino Freeway near the intersection with the Long Beach freeway tipped over in the jolting, according to Los Angeles County fire officials. The driver was unhurt.

The only buildings with anything close to major damage were commercial buildings in Whittier that already were condemned as a result of the 1987 quake and are awaiting demolition.

Most residents seemed to handle it just as sturdily:

A man and woman trapped for an hour in a stalled elevator in the eight-story Beverly Tower, a senior citizens residence in Montebello, waited calmly until rescuers arrived. “I told them they should have had a deck of cards,” said Fire Capt. Orville Reed.

Gem dealer Jacques Mouw, president of Interdiam, was in his 16th-floor office polishing two substantial diamonds of eight and four carats--and together worth “in the high six figures”--when the quake hit. With the wheel spinning at 6,000 r.p.m. “a jolt like that” could have cracked the stones. It didn’t. “I’m calm,” he declared. “No problem.”

Even in Whittier, still recovering economically and emotionally from the trauma of 1987, reaction bordered on the blase. In Central Park, a woman watching her children play on the swings shrugged it off.

“We run outside, then we go back inside,” she said. “What’s new?”

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Paul Feldman, David Ferrell, Mary Lou Fulton, Jim Gomez, Marita Hernandez, Nieson Himmel, Richard Holguin, Charisse Jones, Eric Malnic, Myrna Oliver, Judy Pasternak, Jeffrey A. Perlman, George Ramos, Richard Simon, Jill Stewart, Lois Timnick and Elaine Woo contributed to this story.

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