South California hit by 7.1-magnitude earthquake, largest in two decades

Southern California was rattled by its largest earthquake in two decades late Friday, a 7.1-magnitude tremor that shook buildings and cut power supplies in parts of Los Angeles but did not cause major damage or deaths, officials said.

The shallow quake struck near the small city of Ridgecrest at 8:19 pm (03:19 GMT Saturday), US seismologists said, and follows a 6.4-magnitude quake that hit the same area the day before.

The latest quake was 11 times stronger than the previous day's "foreshock", according to the United States Geological Survey, and is part of what seismologists are calling an "earthquake sequence".

The tremor was felt more than 150 miles (240 kilometers) away in Los Angeles, where the fire department deployed vehicles and helicopters to check on damage and residents in need of emergency aid.

The earthquake was the largest in southern California since 1999 when a 7.1-magnitude quake struck the Twenty nine Palms Marine Corps base, according to The Los Angeles Times.

"We have word of wires down... and *localized* power outages in several City of Los Angeles neighborhoods... besides a handful of apparently small issues, NO major damage to infrastructure has been identified," the Los Angeles Fire Department tweeted.

The department later released a statement saying that its ground and air survey had found "no major infrastructure damage".

"There has been no loss of life or serious injury that we can directly attribute to the widely felt 8:19 PM earthquake," LAFD spokesman Brian Humphrey said in the statement.

The San Bernardino Fire Department tweeted that officers in the city east of Los Angeles were dealing with 911 calls, including one reported minor injury.

"Homes shifted, foundation cracks, retaining walls down," it wrote.

LA police chief Michael Moore posted on his official Twitter account that rail and bus services were not damaged, and that services were still working.

The tremor sent Ridgecrest residents fleeing outside for safety and reporting continued aftershocks, with one woman saying she was "not comfortable" about heading back inside for the night.

The shaking stops "for a minute, and then it starts rolling again... it's pretty bizarre. But now at the moment, I'm not comfortable inside," said Jessica Kormelink.

The quake revived fears of the "Big One" -- a powerful tremor along the San Andreas Fault that could devastate major cities in southern California.

On Thursday, Caltech seismologist Lucy Jones had warned a press conference that there was "about a one-in-20 chance that this location will be having an even bigger earthquake within the next few days, that we have not yet seen the biggest earthquake of the sequence."

On Friday, Jones tweeted: "You know we say we 1 in 20 chance that an earthquake will be followed by something bigger? This is that 1 in 20 time.

Philippines quake kills at least 11, rescuers race to find survivors

Rescue teams in the Philippines searched for signs of life beneath the rubble of a collapsed four-storey commercial building on Tuesday after a strong earthquake shook the country’s biggest island, killing at least 11 people.

Heavy lifting equipment and search dogs were used as dozens of firefighters, military and civilian rescue teams raced to shift piles of concrete in the town of Porac, about 108 km (67.1 miles) northeast of Manila, where a 6.1 magnitude earthquake destroyed several buildings on Monday.

During the night, seven people were rescued and four dead bodies were pulled out of the rubble of the commercial building, which had caved in on a ground floor supermarket, officials said.

“The rescue is ongoing, they are still hearing a sound, no one can say how many were still trapped,” Pampanga provincial governor Lilia Pineda said in a radio interview.

The quake, which struck at 5 p.m. local time on Monday, was initially reported as being of 6.3 magnitude and later revised down to 6.1 magnitude, the US Geological Survey and Philippines seismology authorities said.

The Philippines is prone to natural disasters, located on the seismically active Pacific “Ring of Fire”, a horse-shoe shaped band of volcanoes and fault lines that arcs round the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

The earthquake was felt strongly in key business areas of Manila, with residential and office buildings evacuated after being shaken for several minutes. Train services were halted and roads and sidewalks were clogged by the sudden exodus of workers.

The government declared Tuesday a holiday for civil servants in Metro Manila to allow for safety inspections of buildings.

The international airport in Clark, a former US military base in Pampanga, remained closed for repairs, while parts of a one corner of a historic church in the province collapsed