Essential California

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, July 5, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. Did you feel the earthquake? The largest temblor in two decades shook Southern California just after 10:30 a.m. Thursday, rattling homes across a wide swath of the state. The magnitude 6.4 quake was centered about 125 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the remote Searles Valley area near where Inyo, San Bernardino and Kern counties meet. The shaking was felt from Long Beach to Fresno and many parts in between. I was on the phone with a friend in my still-unmoving apartment when he suddenly said “earthquake.” A few seconds later, everything started to sway. Like any child of California, I am expertly versed in the art of drop and cover. But the elementary school earthquake-drill muscle memory remains so strong that I found myself improbably scanning my Koreatown living room for a child-sized desk to crawl under, and staring at a doorway, trying to remember whether that safety tip had long since been disproven. (It has, so don’t head there.) In rural Inyokern — 10 miles from Ridgecrest, and about 20 miles from the epicenter of the quake — Virginia Henry was reading in her bookcase-filled bedroom when the shaking started. The 72-year-old toy-store owner immediately thought of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which she’d also experienced. That magnitude 6.9 quake in the Bay Area killed 63 people. Remembering how her husband had been knocked out by falling bookcases in the 1989 quake, Henry retreated from her bookcase-filled bedroom to her closet. “I immediately thought, ‘I probably shouldn’t be sitting there.’” Although the power and the Wi-Fi went out in Inyokern, Henry said her home appeared to have weathered the earthquake without damage.

Cleanup continues at Eastridge Market hours after a 6.4 magnitude earthquake rattled the area. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

In southwest Bakersfield, Emma Gallegos stared as all her kitchen windows started to rattle. “It was surreal,” she said. Hanging lights swung back and forth in a Fresno newsroom, just as they did in a Long Beach Denny’s restaurant where a father and son were eating breakfast more than 200 miles to the south. Residents as far north as Sacramento felt the shaking. In Los Angeles, more than 100 miles from the epicenter, the gentle rolling continued for an improbably long time. Long enough to feel your heart go fast with fear, voice your terror, double back with dark jokes and still have time to calmly remove a visibly swaying vase from a stack of books before the ground went still. Or 20 to 30 seconds, according to many reports.