5.8 Quake Hits in Desert Area Near Ridgecrest : Seismology: The temblor is the strongest jolt in California this year. There are no immediate reports of major damage or injuries.

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered in the sprawling China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station on Wednesday most affected a desert area 10 miles north of the Kern County town of Ridgecrest, and was more than twice as strong as a temblor in the same area Aug. 17, Caltech seismologists reported.

The 4:27 p.m. quake, felt as a rolling motion in Orange County, Los Angeles, Riverside, Las Vegas and as far south as San Diego, was the strongest jolt recorded in California this year.

There were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries in urban areas of Southern California, but the Ridgecrest Police Department said it had received scattered reports of broken windows and other damage in the town of 28,000 about 100 miles north of Los Angeles.

Ridgecrest Community Hospital officials said they were not aware of any injuries.

At the naval weapons station, spokeswoman Ann Carter-Combee said: “We’ve had some power outages, and we had to close the commissary because of broken glass. Those are the only reports of any appreciable damage.”

Pictures were knocked off the wall of the office of base commanding officer Capt. Charles Stevenson, but there were no injuries on the base, which has 4,800 personnel, she said.

Far from the epicenter in Orange County, the administrator for Mission San Juan Capistrano, Gerald Miller, said that “several large chunks” from the 189-year-old Great Stone Church had been dislodged by the quake.

“Every time we get a little shake like this, we lose a little more,” Miller said. “Thank God it wasn’t worse.”

Other damage was reported at Trona, where the foundation of a house was cracked, and Victorville, where a mobile home teetered partially off its foundation.

Dale Milligan, chief of the Barstow Fire Protection District, about 60 miles south of Ridgecrest, described the shock as “a big whoop--enough to get me out of my chair.” But he said his department got no calls of damage.

At Ft. Irwin, east of the epicenter, Army Spec. Ronald Gruen said he had just arrived home when the quake struck. He was relaxing with his wife and child, watching “cartoons on Fox. I looked at my wife and said: ‘Honey, it’s an earthquake!’ It felt like my chair was riding on water. And she said: ‘I don’t feel anything.’ ”

In Orange County, Sheriff’s Lt. Ron Wilkerson said deputies were assigned for a short time to stand by telephones at the department’s Emergency Operations Center, but no problems were reported.

Some commuter trains were halted in Los Angeles as a precaution immediately after the quake, but resumed service in about 20 minutes after inspection of the tracks turned up no damage, said Metrolink spokesman Peter Hidalgo.

Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson said the new temblor was not an aftershock because it was stronger than the original Ridgecrest quake, and now will be considered the “main shock” in a sequence that started Aug. 17. The original quake is now considered a foreshock. There have been about 3,400 shocks in the sequence, but most of them were too weak to be felt.

Another Caltech seismologist, Kate Hutton, said there was about a 5% chance of a larger quake in the next few days. She put the depth of the quake at a relatively shallow 3.3 miles, and said it was just a mile and a half from the epicenter of the Aug. 17 temblor.

“I was home during the one on Aug. 17 and it didn’t shake near as hard or as long as this one,” said Sgt. Al Mitchell of the Ridgecrest Police Department. “There was an initial jolt, followed by 20 seconds of violent shaking and then 20 seconds of rolling.”

Hauksson said the quake had a vertical component, but unlike some other vertical quakes, the earth was pushed down rather than up. The largest aftershock, at 4:31 p.m., measured 4.3, and by 10 p.m., there had been about 900 aftershocks in all.

North Hollywood resident Marjean Mildon said the motion “kind of felt like my house was just moved over slightly. My chandeliers kept swinging for 20 seconds.”

In an odd coincidence, Mildon said that for the first time since the 1994 Northridge earthquake she smelled methane gas near her house about an hour before the Ridgecrest quake. She summoned Los Angeles firefighters, who saw no connection with seismicity.

Times correspondent Jeff Bean contributed to this story.