Ok, that was enough now...

Jeff Oslick

Final Approach
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Jeff Oslick
Just felt the moderate earthquake in LA, 5.3 at the far east end of the Basin. That's the second I've felt in less than a week (one out near Palm Springs on Sunday). That was enough entertainment for awhile, it can stop now...
 
BA is starting to wonder if next weeks Oceanside/Escondido trip is such a good idea...
 
Brian Austin said:
BA is starting to wonder if next weeks Oceanside/Escondido trip is such a good idea...

Actually if it keeps up you will have a shorter drive to the ocean. :D

greg
 
river_rat said:
Actually if it keeps up you will have a shorter drive to the ocean. :D

greg
If it keeps up too much, I'll be PART of the ocean. We're camping in Oceanside, within walking distance to the beach. :(
 
Jeff Oslick said:
Just felt the moderate earthquake in LA, 5.3 at the far east end of the Basin. That's the second I've felt in less than a week (one out near Palm Springs on Sunday). That was enough entertainment for awhile, it can stop now...

Hang around, it get's a bunch better than that. I felt like an earthquake magnet when I lived out there. I was working in Santa Cruz when the Loma Prieta quake hit, spending the night at a buddies in Big Bear when that quake hit, and then Pasadenea when the Northridge quake hit. Makes ya go "Ehh, that all ya got" when a 6.2 or less hits.
 
They just haad a 7.0 there too
 
Brian Austin said:
If it keeps up too much, I'll be PART of the ocean. We're camping in Oceanside, within walking distance to the beach. :(

Brian's going swimming, Brian's going swimming!!! Never fear, maybe your seat cushions can double as handy emergency flotation devices :rofl:
 
Henning said:
Hang around, it get's a bunch better than that. I felt like an earthquake magnet when I lived out there. I was working in Santa Cruz when the Loma Prieta quake hit, spending the night at a buddies in Big Bear when that quake hit, and then Pasadenea when the Northridge quake hit. Makes ya go "Ehh, that all ya got" when a 6.2 or less hits.

I lived in San Jose in 1989 and was at work in Cupertino when the Loma Prieta quake hit. 6 miles from the epicenter to my house, 12 miles slant range. Oh, what a mess. You know what those quakes are good for? The aftershocks allow you to calibrate what it takes to wake you up. My personal threshold? 5.0. Anything less and I'll read about it in the paper. Oh, and you can hear them coming before you feel them, too. When the Nisqually earthquake hit up here a few years ago my wife heard it and had her class under their desks before the building even started shaking. And then one of the kids asked if it was a drill. :D
 
Joe Williams said:
Brian's going swimming, Brian's going swimming!!! Never fear, maybe your seat cushions can double as handy emergency flotation devices :rofl:
I'm gonna look pretty silly walking around town with a lifejacket on... :D
 
hopefully, pretty soon my plan will pay off, and Ill own ocean front property in Arizona :)
YAY.
 
Brian Austin said:
We're taking the fifth wheel to Oregon in August. SWMBO's parents are on the coast, just north of Gold Beach, on 40+ acres or so. We stay in the guest cabin. The camper is for the ride up and back.

?? You can fly it in 1 day.:D
 
Michael said:
hopefully, pretty soon my plan will pay off, and Ill own ocean front property in Arizona :)
YAY.

But it will still be AZ.

Today's quake has been downgraded to 4.9 yet CNN, FOX, Wolf, et al, are all like the end is near. Puh-leaze. The reason it's getting any press is because it's near a major city. Since 12/04 we've had >ten 4.5 or larger but you don't hear us talking like we're gonna' die. Sheet, they even had some Yucaipa City dept head on CNN sounding all whiney like he had been crying and fearing for his life.

Brian, you just come on out to Oceanside and act like nothing happened...because nothing happened. Have fun.
 
Joe Williams said:
I don't think the Skyhawk will tow that trailer...
Amen.

Nor will it carry...

a wife
a 70 lb dog
five flyrods, waders and assorted items that seem to follow me around when fishing
flytying stuff (because one can never have too many flies)
scrapbooking stuff
four or five knitting projects (because apparently they're different although how one tells is beyond me)
20+ lbs of camera equipment
computers for two (still have to check in at work since the world ends if I'm unavailable apparently)
dog food
two seasons worth of clothes (since apparently it can be 70 one day and 95 the next)

And, to top it off, I'm not IR and not likely to be in six weeks. Gold Beach airport is right on the coast.
 
Brian Austin said:
I'm gonna look pretty silly walking around town with a lifejacket on... :D

True, but let's see who's laughing at you when Colorado suddenly turns into beachfront property... :eek:
 
Jeff Oslick said:
Just felt the moderate earthquake in LA, 5.3 at the far east end of the Basin. That's the second I've felt in less than a week (one out near Palm Springs on Sunday). That was enough entertainment for awhile, it can stop now...

That's what you get for living on a plate margin....
 
wsuffa said:
That's what you get for living on a plate margin....

Thanks Bill, I know... I'm a geologist. Actually, I'd love to come back a few tens of millions of years from now when LA will be a suburb of Anchorage B).

I kinda find this hilarious in some ways, since this is the 3rd quake in a week after I just started teaching earth science again (part-time) 2 weeks ago. It's giving me lots of great material.

My original bet with the other geologist in my office was that it was a 4.5 fairly close to us, since I felt a good bit of a vertical acceleration right at the start, I knew it had to be somewhere in the LA Basin (though Yucaipa is way out at the far east end). When they're farther away you only feel rolling motion usually. He guessed a 5.0 - so my internal calibration sensor needs some more work. The are two widely reported "scales" for earthquakes. The first number is the local shaking number - the old Richter Scale. The other number, that takes some time to calculate is the Moment Magnitude, which, IIRC, is more a direct function of the size of the break. This one was a 5.3 Richter Magnitude and 4.9 Moment Magnitude. They numbers are usually closer together, but it depends on the type of rock/sediment in the area of the epicenter.

Jeff
 
Jeff, back when I lived about two miles east of you in Fullerton (right near CSUF), I would listen to the seismic net reports on the CalTech ham repeater (145.460 or 147.35? I forget now). In any event, after a quake, I could tell in about two minutes of listening to those quick, concise reports where the quake was centered (once I knew the general geography, of course).

Never could get "used" to them, but only one that rattled me was the Whittier Narrows one- I was in the shower and darned near fell down. When the rumbling and rolling stoppped (it was a 6.1, IIRC), all I could hear was barking dogs and car alarms. When I drove to work about an hour later in my convertible, I was suddenly keenly aware of going under overpasses in stop & go traffic on the 91.

Ah, earthquakes. What fun.
 
There is a great website for quickly checking earthquakes around CA now:

www.scec.org (Southern California Earthquake Center).

Usually can pull up the stats within a minute or two. They also do online data collection through their "Did you feel it?" surveys. I didn't check the total number today, but for the Anza quake on Sunday, there were 16,000 "did you feel it" responses inside of 30 minutes after the quake. I bet it was far more today - I know the site became pretty slow. These data help seismologists determine surface shaking and damage patterns for different types/sizes of quakes.

Jeff
 
SCCutler said:
Jeff, back when I lived about two miles east of you in Fullerton (right near CSUF), I would listen to the seismic net reports on the CalTech ham repeater (145.460 or 147.35? I forget now). In any event, after a quake, I could tell in about two minutes of listening to those quick, concise reports where the quake was centered (once I knew the general geography, of course).

In Silicon Valley tune in the 146.115 repeater and you'll get the same types of reports. Same result, within minutes you have a great idea where the epicenter was located and a general idea of the magnitude. That, or when we lived there just call my wife. She could usually nail it just from the feel. Don't ask me how, I don't know.
 
Main thing is that, after any quake, of any size, the TV news talking heads will babble incoherently for hours; they'll show video of grocery stores with food in the aisles, broken plate glass being swept up on a sidewalk, and they'll tell you it was felt as far away as Las Vegas but that the gamblers did not even pause in their gaming.
 
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