We Interrupt Your TUESDAY HOOKER!!! Coverage for Breaking News . . .

. . . I was driving, didn't even feel the stupid thing, so I have nothing to report, other than I've got no cel service at the moment (most likely due to the network being taxed by frantic calls of people checking in with each other, not infrastructure damage of any kind).

I blame Professor Althouse, she wanted the total L.A. experience, and that includes the temblors . . .

Judging from the shake map, it was barely a ripple by the time it travelled here, though it looks like it should have been felt as a strong shudder by millions of people from Downtown on east, and all the way south to Long Beach.

Damage should be light, though crap will be strewn.

Also, I shouldn't be too jokey about this, from time to time these initial jolts aren't the main shock, but a foreshock of something worse, later, hopefully that's not the case this time.

UPDATE:



There's the jpg of the shake map. Lots of yellow, which corresponds with strongly felt, but a light potential for damage, and as you can see on the map, Santa Monica was in the weak to not felt range. Also, it looks like they've downgraded the initial magnitude to 5.6 from 5.8, and as damage assessments factor in what they say the magnitude is, sounds like the initial signs are lots of shaking, but no breaking.

UPDATE, TOO:

The PAGER system estimates population exposure at each level of intensity, and it looks like over 5 million people felt this as a strong shake, and 7 million people felt a significant but light shaking, so that explains the cel phone network going down. I bet at least 2 million of those folks have been dialing repeatedly over the last hour, and the cel network isn't designed to handle that volume all at once.

Luckily, buildings here are robust, and after Northridge, compliance with building codes have been more rigorously enforced, plus the epicenter is in neighborhoods that have sprung up recently, so they shouldn't get anything worse than a cracked monitor or LCD TV or two (one advantage of those big heavy CRTs, harder to topple, less top heavy).

UPDATE, THRICE:

If this is some entity smiting me and this whole area for those TJ Hooker posts, my sincerest apologies for the fright and inconvenience this may have caused.

Who knew the Zmed still packed such a punch!

UPDATE, 5.4:

Magnitude 5.4 is the latest estimate of the intensity, which is significantly lower than the initial 5.8 (it's an exponential scale so that's a big difference in energy, a 5.8 shake is about 2.51 times larger than a 5.4 shake, and compared to the 7.8 shake in Chengdu not long ago, move that decimal over twice, so the Chengdu earthquake generated 251 times the energy compared to the moderate quake we just had).

Also, Wolf Blitzer keeps calling it a "strong earthquake", but according to the USGS, you don't get to call a quake "strong" until it's above a 6, from 4.5 to 5.9, "moderate" is the better term to use. "Strong earthquake" suggests real damage over a significant area with loss of life. This wasn't that kind of event, this was just a jar breaker, and the occasional water main buster (this time, there's always a next time).