Quake Jolts Area Near Palm Springs

A magnitude 5.0 earthquake, the strongest aftershock of the 1992 Landers quake in nearly a year, struck before dawn Sunday in a sparsely populated, mountainous area of Joshua Tree National Park above Desert Hot Springs.

No damage or injury reports were received after the 4:03 a.m. temblor, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said. It was centered 15 miles northeast of Palm Springs and four miles south of the epicenter of the 6.1 Joshua Tree quake of April 22, 1992, that started the Landers sequence.

The Landers shock of June 28, 1992, measured a powerful magnitude 7.5, and the sequence has had more than 45,000 aftershocks. Sunday’s, as recorded at Caltech, was the strongest since June 16, 1994.

“We certainly felt it,” said John Hilton, owner of the Emerald Springs Resort in Desert Hot Springs. “This one was one big jolt, but it didn’t last 10 seconds. It was nowhere near as bad as the original quakes.”

The aftershock awakened residents in Palm Springs and was felt as far away as the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County, where police reported phone calls from concerned residents and some car alarms that appeared to be set off by the earthquake. But many in Orange County simply slept through it all, and no injuries were reported, police said.

Egill Hauksson, a Caltech seismologist, said six aftershocks, magnitude 3.0 or less, were measured in the first hours after Sunday’s large aftershock, which was located just five miles from the San Andreas fault as it runs along the northeast side of the Coachella Valley.

Normally, a temblor this close to California’s most dangerous fault would cause seismologists some concern about a bigger quake, Hauksson said. But the north-south orientation of Sunday’s temblor, as compared to the northwest-southeast alignment of the San Andreas, was more consistent with a Landers aftershock than a San Andreas foreshock, he said.