4.2 Temblor Jolts Nerves in Southland

A 4.2 magnitude earthquake struck Los Angeles Sunday, breaking windows, tossing bottles from store shelves and rattling nerves, but causing little serious material damage.

The tremor struck shortly after 4:59 p.m. and was centered a mile northwest of the La Brea tar pits in the La Cienega-Beverly area, said Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Southern California.

Though weak in scale, the quake’s shallow depth of 2.5 miles below the surface made residents’ sensations of ground motion much stronger and more widespread, Jones said. It also made it difficult to identify with a specific fault, except to say the motion occurred along a strike-slip fault south of the well-known Santa Monica-Hollywood thrust fault, Jones said.

“This is particularly shallow,” Jones said. “When you have a jolt of this depth, just 2 1/2 miles down, it can really be felt on the surface. As you get into downtown Los Angeles, it’s the combination of the soft soil and the shallow depth that led people to feel the shaking.”

Reports of shaking and subsequent aftershocks came from as far south as Orange County and as far north as the Antelope Valley. City and county fire departments went into earthquake emergency modes, pulling their equipment outside of buildings and sending helicopters aloft to scout damage.

The Los Angeles County sheriff’s and Los Angeles Police departments reported no serious injuries. The most graphic sign of damage occurred at a building on Kelton Avenue in Westwood, where a wall of glass blocks shattered, leaving someone’s home office visible from the street.

At the Beverly Center, where the tremor was strong enough to set clothing swaying on the racks, pandemonium ensued as shoppers fled the mall’s parking garage.

Bloomingdale’s salesclerk Zhanna Nalbandyan said she left the floor and ran for cover as the building began shaking. “I was helping a customer when it happened and I ran,” she said. “We have nowhere to hide. I don’t want to die in Bloomingdale’s.”

Plenty of patrons had the same thoughts, grabbing their cell phones and car keys and dashing for the garage.

“The entire mall left in a parade. Women were crying all over the place,” said actress Laurie Bailey, who was shopping with her friend and fellow actress, Diane Farr.

“It was such a jolt that we were trying to figure out if it was an earthquake or a bomb in the parking lot,” Farr said. “We were in such a panic to get out that we forgot the one thing that we came to get, which is a hair dryer.”

Bobby Nunn, 28, a cashier at Whole Foods Market in West Hollywood, was ringing up a customer’s order when her survival instinct kicked in and she vaulted over a counter.

“You hear stories about mothers who pick up cars when their babies are under them,” she said. “Something just happens inside you. It’s not superhuman powers, it’s just survival instincts,” she said.

About 30 customers joined Nunn in the parking lot before returning to the store, where a few bottles had fallen to the floor and smashed. “Some customers told me they would pay me a million dollars to see me do it again,” she joked. “People asked me, ‘How can your body react faster than mine?’ But I was not going to get caved in.”

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Times staff writers Erika Hayasaki, Charles Ornstein, Richard Winton and Valli Herman-Cohen contributed to this story.