5.1 Quake Jolts Kern County, Is Felt in L.A.

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck Kern County on Saturday and was felt as far away as downtown Los Angeles, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage in either county.

The quake struck at 12:18 p.m. and was centered about 13 miles east of Maricopa and 25 miles south-southwest of Bakersfield, according to a preliminary report from the U.S. Geological Survey.

At Tina’s Diner off the main highway through the town of about 1,000 residents, Larry Hickerson, 83, was eating an egg lunch when the quake rattled his table for about 30 seconds.

“We were sitting here in the restaurant, and she just shook us pretty good here. It wasn’t a long one; it was just two or three jolts,” he said. “The water shook a bit.”

Although the quake failed to knock anything off the walls of her mobile home, “they’re all scary,” said Nelda Floyd, 60, who felt the shaking as she was cooking.

“I’m just waiting on the ... San Andreas [fault],” she said. “That’s right here in our back door practically.”

Several small aftershocks of magnitudes 1.6 to 2.4 hit Saturday afternoon, said Joe Franck, a seismologist at Caltech in Pasadena.

Dozens more of them are anticipated to strike over the next few days.

“We expect to have aftershocks with an event of this size ... but nothing we can feel,” Franck said.

Maricopa is 100 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles and 25 miles west of Interstate 5, at the far southwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley.

The hamlet is on California Highway 33, which runs north from Ventura and Ojai over the mountains into the Central Valley.