I’m on my phone here, so no link, but if you Google Eric Lauer (the Padres pitcher that night) and earthquake, he’s actually quoted as saying that he did NOT feel it. The players on the field eventually noticed a commotion in the stands, but had to be told by others about the quake.
I felt it in Orange County, indoors on the second floor. It was a fun roller, rather than a shaker, and lasted a surprisingly long time.
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You can generally feel a magnitude 5 or so, if you’re paying attention, though you might mistake it for heavy machinery moving, or the like.
A 7 is 100 times stronger than that. You’d definitely feel a 7, and I’m very impressed by the reports that nobody was killed in this one.
Eightish years ago, my wife were in the same roughly 4.5 Richter earthquake. I was in the seventh story of a ten story building that swayed violently. It was very obvious to me that it was an earthquake. I texted my wife to ask if she was okay. She said she was fine and she didn’t know why I was asking. She was outside and watched all the people suddenly evacuating the buildings around her. She had no idea what was going on until I told her about the earthquake.
It was surprising how long it lasted. I was on the ground floor in a house, seated on a sofa. It was a subtle, gentle rolling, it was long lasting, and a little dizzying.
It does not surprise me that the ballplayers on the field didn’t notice it. I haven’t looked it up but the players in the dugout may have felt it, especially those seated on the bench.
I was in Berkeley in 1989 during the earthquake and I literally saw the ground in a park moving like there were waves. Then part of a facade fell off a nearby building. I cannot say that your nephew is wrong, but oh hell yes, the earthquake was sure as hell felt by other people on the ground in Berkeley.
It depends on the ground beneath you. The liquefaction in San Francisco’s Marina District caused many structure failures in some areas of The Marina, but other homes in The Marina were just fine.
I rode my motorcycle through The Marina the day after the earthquake, taking many pictures — I was a freelance photographer for the SFSU University newspaper.
Probably. I remember seeing in the paper in the following days, some house on Divisidero looking like a giant had sat on it. Fires on Pacific Avenue. But you’re right, I think it was the Marina district that was having the issues with liquefaction.
Strange that so many of us here have lived and worked in the Monterey Bay Area. It is a very pretty part of the country though. Though I don’t miss driving 17 at all. Small world.
To be fair, there isn’t a whole lot out by Ridgecrest. One of the reasons the Navy likes to use the area for testing bombs, missiles, and the like. Have the same earthquake on the Hayward Fault or Hollywood Fault, and it’d be a different story. Did anyone die in the slightly larger Landers Earthquake in 92 or 93, which was also largely in the middle of nowhere?
1992 Landers earthquake - Wikipedia (Looks like 3 people did, with 2 of those being heart attacks.
So, yay California building codes.
If you are in the vicinity of the 5.0 epicenter, you are not going to mistake it for anything but an earthquake. 5.0 is enough to feel definite instability in the “ground”, though it wouldn’t knock you over unless you were unbalanced.
And a 7 is not “100 times stronger than that.” The logarithmic scale is not base 10. IIRC, each single digit is approximately 30 times as much power. So you’re talking 900 times as much.
Most of the houses in Ridgecrest were built in the late 60s and later. Anything built after the 1950s Kern County earthquake was probably pretty safe, since IIRC, that was the earthquake that prompted California building codes to require “J” bolts to bolt the frame of a house to the foundation. Almost all of the significantly damaged homes in Ridgecrest appear to be mobile homes (there were a couple of structure fires that weren’t mobile homes).
Trona, equally close to the epicenter of the first quake, slightly farther from the second quake, had more damage. That town had some older structures. China Lake NAWS may have had damage to older homes on the base, some of which go back to the late 40s. I’ll know more when I get to Ridgecrest tomorrow.
Looking it up, it looks like a single-number increase in the scale corresponds to a factor of 10 in the wave amplitude (so a 7 has waves of 100 times the amplitude of a 5), but that the energy release scales as amplitude to the 3/2 power (so a 7 releases 1000 times the energy of a 5). So we’re both correct, there, depending on what one means by “stronger”. Damage tends to be roughly proportional to energy, but how much you feel it is likely to depend more on the amplitude.
Yes, it was the Marina district. A friend of ours had a home there and was not answering the phone after the quake. We were hoping it was because he’d fled due to gas leak concerns (turned out he was on a trip to the UK) but didn’t even know if the building was still standing. One of the places that caught fire was a block from his and as the news copter circled the scene we were frantically looking at the background to see if his was still intact. Unfortunately, it kept being obscured by the smoke column – very frustrating.