SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — A 5.2 magnitude earthquake rattled through several counties across Southern California Monday morning.
If you thought the shaking felt more powerful than a magnitude 5 earthquake, you are not alone.
UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography Seismologist Alice Gabriel said the preliminary shaking data shows so far that this earthquake has had higher shaking reports than what is typically expected from an earthquake of this magnitude.
“That will be topic of future research of why we had such widely felt shaking reports for such a moderate size earthquake,” Gabriel said.
She said Monday’s earthquake was the largest recorded in decades on the Elsinore Fault zone.
“That’s kind of a little sibling to the big San Andreas Fault, and it’s the largest earthquake on that specific fault zone since 1983,” Gabriel added.
Because the epicenter was so far inland, Gabriel said experts were quickly able to rule out any risk for a tsunami warning.
“Since this earthquake was located far away from the ocean, it didn’t have the chance to displace sea water and it didn’t trigger a tsunami,” Gabriel said. “It’s one of the big scientific problems, we can predict the weather really well, we know statistically at least the chance for rain on any given day, but we can’t predict what happens underneath our feet.”
No damage was reported in downtown San Diego, but around 300 construction workers evacuated a construction site of a high-rise building after the earthquake to make sure the building was secure.
“I was working, I was upstairs sweeping and when I was sweeping I guess the whole building moved, and I saw the windows and it all shaking side to side, and they were calling us, telling us to evacuate,” construction worker Isaac Cortez said. “Every construction site they evacuate when something happens like that, so if anything falls or breaks we aren’t inside and we don’t get hurt.”
After the earthquake, the city closed the City Administration Building for inspection and moved the City Council meeting to the Civic Theatre.
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