New Tremors End a Week of Stillness

For 171 hours and 46 minutes the ground under the San Fernando Valley didn’t buckle. It didn’t heave. It hardly even quivered. The demons of the dirt were on holiday, it seemed.

But Friday morning they were back, rattling floors and ceilings and everything in between.

And just when Valley residents thought it was safe to live there.

The first shaker, measuring 4.0, hit at 4:59 a.m. and was centered four miles east-southeast of Newhall, according to Caltech seismologists.

The second temblor, at 5:11 a.m., measured 3.2 and was centered two miles west-northwest of Granada Hills.

The third, at 5:56 a.m., measured 3.6 three miles north-northeast of San Fernando.

The Valley hadn’t felt an aftershock 3.7 or greater since 1:13 a.m. Feb. 18, according to Caltech.

It had been so long since a tremor that one Granada Hills woman had actually considered sleeping Thursday night in her upstairs bedroom for the first time since Jan. 17. But at the last minute, she changed her mind and bedded down with her husband once again on the couch.

“It’s a good thing I did,” she said. “You can’t calm down. You’re always expecting an aftershock but they still rattle you.”

Her name?

“Just say a Granada Hills resident,” she said. “I don’t want people to think I’m a baby.”

Whatever the reaction, the most recent aftershocks were the talk of the town.

“We’re all experts now,” Northridge jeweler Sherry Kaplan said of the Valley’s amateur seismologists, who can pinpoint the strength of aftershocks if not with accuracy, at least with conviction.

At Postal Preference, a mail and card shop in Northridge, the facts were being laid on the counter.

“They say it’s only coincidence that most of them happen between 4 and 6 in the morning. I don’t buy that,” Alesha Haase said from behind the counter .

“It was hot. I knew it would happen,” a customer said.

“You know it never happens when it rains,” Haase said.

“It happens when the moon is in the right place and the stars are in the right place,” added Coral Haase, Alesha’s mother and the store’s owner.

“It’s all anybody ever talks about,” said Alesha Haase. “If it’s not Tonya and Nancy, it’s the earthquake.”