Strongest Quake of Year Jars Desert : Seismology: The 6.0 temblor is centered southeast of Bishop. It is widely felt but does little damage.

A magnitude 6.0 earthquake, the strongest in California this year, struck Monday afternoon in a sparsely populated desert region in the Last Chance Mountains about 35 miles southeast of Bishop.

Although the earthquake was felt over a wide area, as far away as Sacramento, Fresno, and parts of Los Angeles, no injuries or major damage were reported.

The National Earthquake Information Center at Golden, Colo., said the temblor occurred at 4:21 p.m. and there were a number of small aftershocks.

In Bishop, where moderately strong shaking was reported, authorities said a propane pipe ruptured at a U.S. Forest Service station. A Fresno man said there were minor cracks in a building there.

Items fell off shelves at Mair’s Market in the Inyo County town of Independence but nothing broke.

At Deep Springs College, in a small community within 15 miles of the epicenter, student Matt Ross said, “There was one big (jolt) that shook a few things off the wall and then five little ones after that. But as far as we can tell, there’s no structural damage.”

The quake shook one Santa Ana office building where Joe Straka, a 33-year-old attorney, was working when he felt a small rumble lasting about 10 seconds.

“You can hear it first because the ceiling tiles start moving and they make a creaky noise. Then the building starts moving and the curtains start swaying,” Straka said.

Caltech scientists said it appeared that the temblor occurred on a small secondary fault close to the North Death Valley Furnace Creek fault zone, which parallels the California-Nevada border on the California side.

Kate Hutton, a Caltech seismologist, said that scientists will go to the area to see if there is any surface rupture from the earthquake, which was in a remote location far from any of the seismic instruments geologists have placed around the state.

The immediate area around the epicenter has not been active in the recent past, Hutton said. But there have been many quakes in the nearby White Mountains and areas closer to Bishop.

Had the earthquake been in a populated area, scientists said considerable damage could have been expected. The 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake in the San Gabriel Valley, which was magnitude 5.9, killed six people and inflicted $350 million in damage just east of Los Angeles.