Dozens still displaced by quake; school, city hall, road closed

Residents in northern Orange County continued to roll with the aftermath of Friday’s 5.1 earthquake as the workweek began, bringing the reality of the damage into clearer focus.

A grade school was closed, as was a well-traveled road. The civic center in La Habra was closed and more than 80 residents were still being prevented from moving back into their homes.

Since the quake Friday, there have been hundreds of aftershocks, leaving residents in La Habra, Brea and Fullerton on edge, though experts said the continued jolts were to be expected.

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Experts said they can’t predict what’s next.

There is precedent for earthquake aftershocks to jump fault lines. The Whittier Narrows earthquake, a magnitude 5.9, struck on the Puente Hills thrust fault system on Oct. 1, 1987. Three days later, a magnitude 5.6 aftershock hit on a different fault, said Egill Hauksson, a Caltech seismologist.

Meanwhile, officials in northern Orange County awoke Monday to deal with the reality of the quake damage. A rock slide on Carbon Canyon Road in Brea -- used by an estimated 20,000 commuters a day -- remained closed. A grade school in Brea was shuttered and the civic center in La Habra was closed briefly while a work crew repaired a water pipe that had snapped during the quake.

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Officials in the hardest-hit cities were expected to begin compiling estimates of damage and trying to determine if state or federal relief is possible.

For the most part, though, it appears damage was modest -- chimneys tumbled to the ground, retail outlets lost inventory as shelves emptied themselves during the shaking and dozens of water lines ruptured, flooding some neighborhoods.

Wayne Sass of Fullerton said a large picture covered with glass flew 9 feet off the wall and shattered within inches of his terrified 9-year-old son. There was broken glass in every room and some cracks in the home’s stucco, he said.

“We spent most of the night just trying to clean it up so the kids wouldn’t wake up in the morning and be reminded of it,” he said.

Their home on Canyon Drive had been without water since early Saturday, when a city crew shut off a broken water main. For most of the night, a geyser 75 feet tall spilled into a giant birdbath-like depression formed when the asphalt dipped, he said.

metrodesk@latimes.com