Magnitude 4.8 earthquake rattles businesses and residents near Big Pine

A magnitude 4.8 earthquake six miles from Big Pine on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada knocked items off store shelves and rattled residents but produced little to no damage Tuesday afternoon, officials said.

The temblor occurred at 3:04 p.m. Pacific time at a depth of 9.3 miles, according to the USGS. It was the biggest earthquake that people up there had felt for some time.

“We definitely felt it. It wasn’t too major,” said Avo Nersesian, a server at Country Kitchen, the only diner in Big Pine. “After it started to shake we had some containers fall off of shelves.”

Nersesian hails from Los Angeles and experienced the Northridge earthquake.

Tuesday’s earthquake “doesn’t even compare,” he chuckled. “One of my customers came in; he’s been here for 45 years and said it’s one of the biggest he’s ever felt.”

Still, the quake was “high up there, even for California standards,” said Rafael Abreu, a geophysicist with the USGS Earthquake Information Center in Colorado. “In terms of depth, it’s close enough to the surface it’s going to generate aftershocks.”

At least six aftershocks, including one measuring magnitude 4.3, were reported in the hour after the original earthquake, Abreu said.

In the last 10 days, there have been two earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater centered nearby.

This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service, and this post was originally created by an algorithm written by the author.

Read more about Southern California earthquakes.

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