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| Local residents shaken up after earthquake |
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| Written by Jonathan Partridge / Patterson Irrigator / | |
| Saturday, 03 November 2007 | |
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In the words of Jerry Lee Lewis, Patterson residents experienced “a whole lotta shakin’ going on” Tuesday evening, following a magnitude-5.6 earthquake that rocked the Bay Area. The moderate quake struck shortly after 8 p.m., about 5 miles northeast of San Jose’s Alum Rock neighborhood and 7 miles east of Milpitas, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.Residents reported feeling the quake, which lasted about a minute, as far east as Carson City, Nev., as far south as Bakersfield and as far north as Eureka. Many local residents said the rumblings gave them a bit of a fright. “I got dizzy,” local resident Joan Session said. “All of a sudden it got rocking and knocking, and I was scared.” The quake was centered in a remote area along the Calaveras Fault, just south of Calaveras Reservoir. It was the largest earthquake to hit Northern California since the 6.9- to 7.1-magnitude Loma Prieta quake in 1989. That temblor, centered near Aptos in the Santa Cruz Mountains, damaged thousands of homes and businesses and caused major roadways, including a section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, to collapse. By contrast, Bay Area media reports indicated that Tuesday’s quake left no major damage, though items were knocked off shelves and some infrastructure in southern Bay Area cities was in need of repair. Still, the quake shook up several area residents — both literally and figuratively. Snow Creek Lane resident Junior Tupouata said a light post outside appeared to be standing still while his family’s house was moving. “Everybody just started yelling … , ‘It’s an earthquake!’” he said. Another nearby resident, Joel Gallegos, laughed, as he recounted how his neighbor had not felt the earthquake and his neighbor’s young daughter got the blame after a clock fell off the wall. Residents in Del Puerto Canyon and the San Antonio Valley, west of Patterson, particularly felt the quake’s effects, as some of them live within 20 to 30 miles of the quake’s epicenter. Del Puerto Canyon resident Susan Conyers said the temblor was intense where she lived. “The dogs started barking; then the shaking began,” she wrote in an e-mail. She said her cats ran out of the living room as fast as they could afterward. “No damage,” she wrote, “just scary.” Another canyon resident, the Rev. Steve Stoppe of First Baptist Church, said he was in Patterson at the time of the quake, but his wife was at home. The quake caused some tinkling of dishes there, he said. “It was shaking, rattling and rolling,” he said with a smile. He noted that the quake happened as he and others began praying at First Baptist Church that night. “It was pretty weird,” he said. As of late Wednesday, there had been 39 aftershocks, mostly within the 1.0 to 2.0 range, said Susan Potter, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. The strongest aftershock was a 3.7-magnitude quake at 3:54 p.m. Wednesday. Others included 2.7- and 2.8-magnitude quakes early Wednesday morning. Despite all that action, many local residents noted the recent temblor was not nearly as frightening — or damaging — as the 1989 quake. Gallegos recalled how that earthquake caused parts of the ground to ripple up a couple of feet high in parts of Oakland, where he happened to be at the time. “Then, one second (later), there was no power, no nothing,” he said. To reach Jonathan Partridge at the Irrigator, call 892-6187 or e-mail him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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