11:42am PDT this morning, everybody was working in the office as normal this morning. Suddenly everything started to shake. 1 second later I realized it's an earthquake. I was freaked out, looking around for any help or any direction, but I got nothing. Xi was still asking, "should we run away?" Then I saw Zehua was running out. I followed immediately without thinking. At the stairs, the building calmed down and the earthquake stopped. Phew~~~ We walked back and found everybody's in the hallway, listening to a professor's talking about some science of earthquakes, "... You can estimate the distance to the epicenter by the interval of the P wave and the S wave. It's the same as estimating the distance to the lightning point by the interval of the lightning and the thunder. For this earthquake, the interval was only a few seconds so the epicenter should be quite near... " I could feel the interval of the two waves but I had no idea how fast those guys propagate. A department secretary was walking around asking if everybody's OK.
I got back to my office. The internet was totally normal. The news saying that the quake magnitude was 5.8 was already published online. How fast! That's about only 3 minutes after the quake. Google map also showed that the epicenter was about 20 miles from Irvine. Professor Chen came in and said our office building can sustain a quake of magnitude 7. Telephone services were jammed for quite a while since too many people were calling families and friends.
After lunch, I went back home to confirm everything's fine. News changed the magnitude of this quake to 5.4.
See also:
- Earthquake Rattles Southern California
- L.A. suburb at quake epicenter gets hard shake
- This is Hollywood, but that shaking wasn't a special effect
- QUAKE'S TRAVEL IMPACTS: Delays but no damage to airports and rails
- `Moderate' Los Angeles Quake Highlights Need for Preparation
