JAGIRL..
No worries...you live in Jamaica! How cool is that! You can call it Cali all day long..we are just having some fun with you.. :)
Best to you..

The last earthquake I felt was the Loma Prieta but that was huge. Heard about the quake on the radio news driving into work and the thought that ran through my head was "why are they reporting on such a small quake?"

Maybe the title should have read "Anybody think the news people over report earthquakes?"

Meant my post to be jokey and forgot to put the winking emoticon. here it is:

;)

Do any of you ever look at www.usgs.gov - the US Geological Survey site? All the earthquake information you ever wanted. What is amazing, though, is how many earthquakes there are every day, and where they are. Guess what? They're not all in California.

Barabara, My friend is from Hollister and says the earthquakes are pretty constant. !

Suzie, oh yes, there are lots in Ca, but there are also lots elsewhere. Isn't Hollister right on "The Fault"

J_Correa- I'm with you on the Loma Prieta one. We were on Hwy. 17 just south of the Pruneyard towers, and it felt like are tires were blowing out. I looked back and saw the taller tower moving.

I actually felt it in SF, which is unusual for me with so small a quake so far south. It has been awhile since I had felt one, I almost didn't recognize it. To all you out of towners worried by the earthquake talk--it is a part of our lives here in California, although some do tend to forget that. However there is some belief that it is better to have the small quakes because it relieves the pressure on the fault lines and it reminds us to check our quake kits. If you think such talk is disturbing, you should hear us speculate and try to guess whether a quake is a 5.9 or 6.1 when we do experience larger quakes.

No, but the sun sure is hot today in Jami!

I felt an earthquake in my 3rd floor dorm room in Kalamazoo MI. I had geology classes the next day and no one believed me until the prof looked it up and there had been a pretty good size one in Indiana at that time. I slept thru one in LA. Of course, here at the canyon, they're pretty frequent, but most are quite small. But we do loose the ocassional balancing boulder!

I feel earthquakes quite often, although the past few months have been pretty quiet and there hasn't been anything to speak of (knock on wood). I didn't feel that one this morning - but I was asleep, and a hour north of the epicenter. A 4.7 doesn't feel small if you're near it, yet not terribly scary if you are used to them. Living, literally, on top of a fault even a 2.something causes quite the jar when it's directly below you. Creaking, thud -- like an elevator you're in dropped unexpectedly about an inch.

The last one that gave me a start was the Santa Maria area one a couple of years ago, a 6.4 I think. Sitting in my parked vehicle, the wave came through and the shocks on the vehicle started moving like I was going over a potholed road. Looking out I saw an orange tree loaded to the hilt with ripe oranges. The were all shaking like a Christmas tree in a strong wind. Eerie.

As everyone recalls, April of this year marked the 100th anniversary the of The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. It was a big event here, still is, and has been commemorated many ways. One day recently, we set out for a day of remembrance, traipsing all over the City. We hit three museums which all had excellent exhibitions looking back to 1906. These were The California Historical Society Museum, SFMOMA and the Legion of Honor. At the Legion of Honor my friend bought me this book of the exhibition that was shown there:
After the Ruins 1906 and 2006, Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, by Mark Klett. It's excellent.

http://www.thinker.org/legion/exhibi...ibitionkey=495

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10236.html

Here's and excerpt I liked, describing one persons recollection the the 1989 quake:

Kimo Bailey recalled:

I know exactly where I was at five o'clock on October 17: at the entrance to Golden Gate Park at the Arguello Gate. I was on Arguello Boulevard facing the park, so I was facing Santa Cruz and the origin of the quake. I was stopped at the stoplight and then I felt this bump and I thought some friend of mine had come up behind me and had tapped my rear bumper. I looked into my rearview mirror and there was no car, and then it dawned on me it could quite possibly be an earthquake.

And then I heard in the sky above me the swishing, the cutting of the overhead wires for the electric buses. I could hear them swishing through the air like a blade cutting the air at high speed. And then I looked and all of Golden Gate Park was in motion. It was incredible. All the trees looked like they were fishing poles -- if you shake a fishing pole they quiver from the bottom to the top and it looked like there was a high wind or some kind of incredible wind blowing, only there was no wind.

There are two big columns, concrete columns, at the gateway to the park, and they were visibly moving from side to side. I could also hear the buildings in that neighborhood, which are all two- to four-story buildings, but close to each other -- some two or three inches apart. I could hear the buildings racking against each other with this incredible noise which seemed to come from everywhere. The noise was like giants taking huge timbers and slamming them together but the noise also seemed to come from the sky and from the ground. It just came from everywhere.

And as I looked I could see in the ground a wave coming through Golden Gate Park, about a foot, foot-and-a-half high, and it ws coming directly at me. As it came through the park and the four lanes of Fulton Street, it lifted the roadbed. The ground seemed to give off a static charge. It looked like -- if you pet a cat in the dark in the winter, as you run your hand over the fur you see charges of static electricity running up and down the cat -- but the static electricity was so thick on the ground it looked like it was a layer of ice, almost. It looked to be half an inch to an inch radiating off the ground as the ground was cracking.

As the wave passed under my car hitting my front tires first, it felt like being on a wave in the sea. So running east to west is the wide street called Fulton, and at 5:04 p.m. when the thing hit, the sun was low in the sky, and as I looked west to my right I saw that all the roadbed between me and the sun was in motion. It was like when you throw a stone into a lake and if the sun or moon is low you catch the sunlight or moonlight on top of the ripples and have a sparkling effect.

Well, I saw the sparkle of the sun on the ground as the earth moved for, like, five seconds. It couldn't have lasted long. The whole event was fifteen seconds. And I looked at the traffic lights, and they were on for a second and then they went off. And I looked out the window next to me, and there was a 1967 or 1968 Cadillac convertible with two black guys from the neighborhood in it, and they looked at me, and I looked at them and said, "That was a f*cking big earthquake!"

And they looked at me and said in the same instant in the same voice, "WE f*cking love it."

giada - you asked if when we have small earthquakes we are afraid it is the big one. My experience is that when the earth starts moving, everyone looks around trying to determine if it is going to be big enough to warrant ducking for cover. We wait for the tell-tale big jolt. If it is only some wiggles or little jolts then ducks. Then when it is over we try to guess the magnitude. If there IS a big jolt, then we know mother nature is serious this time, so we climb under desks and things like that.

We in the Bay Area were pretty shell shocked after Loma Prieta, but we got over it.

giada,
I guess it's kind of similar to living in a hurricane prone area during hurricane season.

You don't really dwell on the fact that a hurricane might hit. But when you hear of a hurricane in the waters everyone pays attention...and kind of wonders if this is gonna be a big one and if it's going to hit your country!

Also in San Jose and didn't feel a thing. I think I was even awake about that time. The dog was sound asleep, too. It's funny how you feel some of them but not others. Some are long rolling things and others are like a sharp slap. As a kid, I remember falling out of my chair at the dinner table when a quick sharp one hit.

Years ago (pre Loma Prieta) there was a rip roaring quake in Santa Clara while I was at work. It caused little if any damage but I was in an all glass building that had those earthquake 'springs'. It felt like you were trying to walk on a waterbed - and that was while I was trying to stand still! There were a few people from back east that I had just 'recruited' out to California. At that moment, they weren't too happy about having moved!

Bluestar~ that account of the 1989 quake was interesting. I remember watching the baseball game that day on tv with my late dad when they interrupted the game and started to show damage, especially the bridge.

Having been raised in Alaska, I had been a young girl when the '59 quake hit. It didn't feel like 9.2, but we were on our homestead in a cabin at the time.
I remember the cupboards rattling, going outside and seeing tall spruce trees swaying like blades of grass above the hay fields.
We are continously rattled up here, hundreds a day actually, but hardly notice any of them because of geography and depth. It does seem, however, on the stillest nights, there is some sort of "sixth sense" before they occur.
When I lived in the Aleutian area of the state, we always looked for birds after a quake. If they stayed, it was okay, if they were leaving, it was nature's signal to run like hell, because we were at sea level. J.

jetset--My dad was at Candlestick Park during the quake. He said he and a friend got out of the stadium as fast as they could.

Quakes are not really like hurricanes, other than the clean up and rebuilding afterwards. There's no two or three day warning for quakes, they just arrive. I don't think many people spend their lives thinking about when the next quake will come.

I find it interesting that lately we seem to hear about a volcano erupting on one side of the earth and almost simultaneously an earthquake on the other. It does make one wonder if this has been happening for centuries and obviously media coverage has not always existed, or can it all really be attributed to global warming with more of these type of events occuring now?

Media has sure changed things . . . and often not for the good. I wonder if there had not been the volcano eruptions in Indonesia if they would have reported this earthquake in CA.?

What do you think?

I'll never forget the '89 quake, that's for sure. October 17th, 5:04 p.m. was forever seared into my memory banks.

I was throwing a World Series party and a group of my buddies were coming over. I'm not a huge baseball fan, definitely not a fanatic, but I was really into it that year because it was "The Battle of the Bay" -- SF vs. Oakland. My best friend had a press pass to game two at the Coliseum a couple of days earlier and had invited me along with a spare pass -- we had a blast.

So that day I got off work at 4:30 and hurried home because the guys were coming around 5. At the time I lived on the top floor (4th) of an apartment complex on a ridge in the East Bay, overlooking the Bay.

Things were ready and I was just waiting for them, they were running a little late.

Then it hit. Whenever a quake starts you try to do an instant analysis of how dangerous you think it is. The way this one became stronger/ more violent with every passing millisecond there was no doubt. I took cover in the bedroom under the bed. It seemed like minutes but it was only about 15-20 seconds I guess. I remember thinking: Ok, this it -- you're done for, say goodbye. I also remember trying to position my body so it wouldn't look too contorted when they found it smashed and lifeless. The creaking and moaning and rattling of things was so loud. The things that go through your mind when the adrenaline is gushing!

Then it stopped. Like Dorothy's house in the Wizard of Oz when the twister drops it in Oz, it's hushed and quiet. The phone still works, the power had blinked but never went out. A few little things had toppled around the apartment but nothing big. Going out on the front balcony I looked down and saw a cream-colored Rolls Royce that was double parked and its shocks were still swaying pretty good. Aside for a million car alarms going off, the atmosphere was dead still, not a leaf moving, not one bird chirping. Total silence of nature. That was eerie.

Next impulse was to go check on the neighbors, and as I opened the door there were the guys coming up the stairs. They said they had never seen anyone's eyes as big as mine - said about the size of silver dollars! When they came in a huge picture over the fireplace came crashing down and the glass shattered into a million pieces. Scared the sh*t out of us, then we laughed.

Well, we watched TV and consumed beer, mass quantities. It was like a dream seeing all that had transpired around the Bay float by in images before us on the television. The Cypress structure double-decked freeway collapse, the Bay Bridge section that gave way, the Marina fire, the panic at Candlestick, and more painted a very grim picture. Just before sunset we could see the smoke from the Marina and the freeway rising straight up into the atmosphere in the still dead-still air.

My number wasn't up that particular day, I was lucky. That quake gave me a new appreciation of the power and dangers of the earth that I will never forget.

For those of us not from CA or who have never experienced an earthquake, thanks for the great description, bluestar!