Recent Quake Swarm Has Westside Feeling Shaky : Temblors: As scale readings go, the recent rumbles haven’t been particularly large or dangerous. But try telling that to residents unaccustomed to life so near an epicenter.

“I thought a boat blew up in the harbor.”

“It was like an express train rolling through our hotel room.”

“It was like someone ran into the building with a truck.”

“It was like a big CRUNK.”

Actually, it was a 3.7-magnitude earthquake, the kind that seismologists say is “getting to the point where it would barely do a little bit of damage.” Seasoned earthquake reporters have been known to refuse to get out of bed for anything less than a 4.5. In Barstow, 3.7s can happen every week, but nobody cares, unless you’re in Barstow.

This time, though, the Little Ones happened on the Westside of Los Angeles. In fact, they keep happening--in the past three days there have been four in the 3 range and a several in the 2 range. They are so small that people in Downtown Los Angeles hardly feel them. If you are jogging, you might miss the whole thing. So, one might ask, how bad can it be?

But Santa Monica is accustomed to rolling on the fringes of earthquakes centered a comfy distance away, like in the desert. Santa Monica is not accustomed to sitting almost on top of the epicenter, and residents expect the rest of us to have the decency to pay attention when it appears their world of free-range chicken, lobster risotto and loafers without socks is about to collapse.

They scan the television stations searching desperately for a news flash. They call the local newspaper demanding to know why the latest 2-point-something wasn’t on the front page.

“I was watching the Raiders. They were playing at the Coliseum and they didn’t even react! It wasn’t on TV for at least 45 minutes,” Adrian Gonzalez, a recent UCLA grad and lifetime Westside resident said with astonishment.

He was so beside himself that he slept right through another one two nights later.

That’s the way it goes here. In earthquake terms, these shakers are small potatoes. But sitting in the middle of one has a way of grabbing your attention. You get that sinking feeling in your stomach, briefly contemplate The Big One, imagine Montana Avenue dropping into the sea, then go back to writing your screenplay.

“It permits us to stop using the stir sticks in our cappuccinos,” said comedian Chris Barnes, who does improvisation at Upfront, a club in the Third Street Promenade, where he and several others were performing one night this week when the whole place went thud. (“That’s what happens when you don’t laugh,” one comic hollered at the audience. Then the show went on.)

Westsiders seem to react in a variety of ways. They duck under the door frame. They run outside. They size up what fell off the wall and if so, who got hit on the head. One Venice man set his earthquake kit and his cat carrier next to the door and went back to bed.

Some hardly seem to notice.

A couple visiting their children from Philadelphia was browsing in J.C. Penney’s when a 3.2 hit at 11:28 a.m. Wednesday. “There were people in the department store who didn’t even stop shopping. It was amazing,” Rita Smiler said.

Contrary to what some Westsiders think, their quakes do not happen at a “special angle” that make them more forceful than anyone else’s earthquakes. However, these do involve a somewhat disturbing phenomenon called “vertical thrust,” meaning that one side of the fault sort of leaps up and falls on the other side of the fault. (Prompting one resident to observe, “It wasn’t a normal earthquake. It was up and down.”)

Those most unnerved seem to be the recent transplants, but even they adapt quite quickly. One waitress who moved from Ohio four months ago was terrified on Sunday but by Wednesday found the entire event rather humdrum.

If some residents find themselves discussing all this in the line at Gelson’s, however, they must be forgiven. The Westside is in the clutches of a “quake swarm,” a group of quakes where none is much bigger than the rest.

But in Santa Monica it is. And despite the deceptively unruffled ambience at the sidewalk cafes Wednesday, these people will be just as glad when the whole thing ends.

“We were all sort of hoping it would be the Big One,” Brentwood resident Paul Levy said. “Drop into the ocean and get it over with.”

When the Earth Moved The Westside has been on the receiving end of a series of small earthquakes centered two miles southwest of Santa Monica. No one has been injured, officials say.

When: Sunday, 3:01 p.m.

Magnitude: 3.7

When: Sunday, 10:12 p.m.

Magnitude: 3.1

When: Tuesday, 11:27 p.m.

Magnitude: 3.5

When: Wednesday, 11:28 a.m.

Magnitude: 3.2

Source: Caltech