THE LANDERS AND BIG BEAR QUAKES : O.C. Residents Assess Quake Damage : Impact: Minor cracks in buildings and strewn merchandise are the extent of losses.

After riding out the weekend’s twin earthquakes with few problems other than frayed nerves, folks in Orange County got back to business as usual Monday. But there were a few exceptions.

At Lippe-Waren Fine Crystal in downtown Laguna Beach, damage from the earthquake was limited to about $10,000 to $20,000 in merchandise. The worst casualty: a $3,000 vase that fell over and broke during the big shakers.

“Considering the really expensive things we have here, I think we were very lucky,” said assistant manager Bruce-Todd Sharp. As a precaution, the store moved everything to the floor for the next few days.

Other workers, meanwhile, returned Monday to find damaged buildings.

In Fullerton, the oldest high-rise in Orange County suffered minor damage during Sunday’s quakes. Ornamental terra-cotta designs on the outside of the five-story Chapman Building in downtown Fullerton cracked, and a small portion of the decorations on the 63-year-old structure fell to the ground.

Fullerton also suffered two minor water main breaks during Sunday’s quakes, said Sylvia Palmer Mudrick, a city spokeswoman. Both were repaired within hours of the first quake, a 7.4-magnitude temblor centered in the desert near Yucca Valley. “Ironically enough, one (of the water main breaks) was on Yucca” Avenue, Palmer Mudrick said.

At the 11-story Bank of America Tower in Anaheim, the two earthquakes caused partition walls to separate, but city building officials gave the structure a clean bill of health.

The Seal Beach Pier also suffered damage. Officials surveying the wooden structure in a lifeguard boat discovered a small split in one of the pilings and a cracked cross-member. Neither is considered serious, officials said.

At UC Irvine, the school library was closed all day Sunday and only some of the floors were reopened Monday as workers picked up the heaps of books that spilled from shelves. Among those were rare volumes that were damaged when they fell onto the floor.

Jonathan Cohen, a 22-year-old UC Irvine student from New York, survived his first big earthquake and then learned about some typical after-earthquake behavior: People flock to stores to buy water.

“The entire water shelf was empty,” Cohen said after visiting a local supermarket. “Outside, there was a line, 10 or 12 long, of people holding water containers to fill up at the vending machine.”

“At first I thought it was stupid, the earthquake already happened. But then I heard on the radio that there was a good chance of more earthquakes and I emptied out my bottles and bought some myself.”

Humans weren’t the only ones exhibiting unusual behavior. At the Santa Ana Zoo, keepers reported that the colobus monkeys refused to go back into their ape house after the quakes. A black howler monkey, meanwhile, suffered a bout of diarrhea that zoo officials suspect was brought on by the quake. The blue and yellow macaws were hanging tightly to their chain-link cage after the temblors instead of sitting as usual on their perches.

“They were glued to the cage door,” said Connie Sweet, the zoo’s animal curator. “Today, everybody is absolutely fine. No problems. No diarrhea. No nothing.”

Times staff writer Thuan Le and correspondents Leslie Knowlton Herzog, Helaine Olen and Rick VanderKnyff contributed to this story.