Magnitude 5.6 Earthquake Jolts Area From Mojave to Mexico

A moderate earthquake with an epicenter about 20 miles south of Palm Springs jolted residents from north of the Mojave Desert to south of the Mexican border Sunday morning, but officials said there were no reports of serious injuries or damage.

“We’re a two gas station town ... and neither one fell down,” said Kalev Kulbin, a firefighter with the Riverside County Fire Department’s station in Anza, a rural community about six miles northwest of the quake’s epicenter in a remote area of dry rolling hills.

The magnitude 5.6 earthquake shook a normally quiet section of the San Jacinto fault zone, Southern California’s most active, which runs from near San Bernardino to the southeast near the Salton Sea, said Anthony Guarino, a seismic analyst at Caltech. That placed it within a few miles of a 5.1 magnitude quake that struck on Oct. 30, 2001, and not far from the 6.6 magnitude Superstition Hills quake of 1987, Guarino said.

Within 90 minutes of the 8:41 a.m. earthquake, more than 24,000 people had signed onto a U.S. Geological Survey website to submit a report describing how the quake felt, answering such questions as: Did you notice the swinging/swaying of doors or hanging objects?

A map posted on the website pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shakeindicated that people in ZIP Codes throughout Southern California reported feeling the quake, including Barstow, Baker, Gorman, Palmdale, San Diego and Brawley.

“Sunday morning must be a good time for reporting earthquakes,” said Kate Hutton, another Caltech seismologist, who added that the website typically gets about 5,000 reports after similarly sized earthquakes.

Many described a sharp jolt followed by a slow rolling sensation that caused nausea in some, officials said.

Dan Hurtado, 61, who raises dairy goats and other livestock on six acres in Anza, was feeding his chickens when the ground beneath him pitched. “I jumped backward out of the chicken coop in case it fell on me,” Hurtado said. “I thought it was going to be the end.”

Instead, it proved far from the Big One. Back in his house, Hurtado found little damage. All told, a few pictures and the mounted head of a mule deer had fallen off the wall.

Minor damage, including a small rockslide on Highway 74 near Palm Desert and cracks in Highway 111 near the Salton Sea, appeared to have been caused by the quake, officials said.

“Something like this, an earthquake in the desert, you use this as a reminder that we live in earthquake country,” said Guarino. “Have three days of food and water on hand.”

Times staff writer Jason Felch contributed to this report.