The mild shaker struck not far from the View-Park Windsor Hills and was felt across the region, perhaps strongest at the Baldwin Hills oil fields and the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, around eight miles from downtown L.A.
Tremors caused speculation on social media that they were caused by heavy drilling for oil, but a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey said that was not true, according to the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
Dr. Lucy Jones of the U.S.G.S. said the quake occurred near a known fault, the Newport Inglewood Fault, and was too far beneath the surface — six miles — to be related to any drilling activity.
“The focal mechanism matches the Newport Inglewood fault which was producing [earthquakes] long before we were pumping oil,” Jones said in a post on the Twitter social media website.
The earthquake epicenter was 2,000 feet from a smaller 2.5-magnitude shaker reported at 4:35 p.m., an event considered a foreshock heralding further seismic activity, Jones said.
A 1.3-magnitude aftershock occurred at 10:37 p.m., the newspaper said.
But the moderate and small shakers were enough to put the Los Angeles Fire Department into its earthquake response mode as firefighters swept across the city to look for damage.
Fire department spokesman Shawn Lenske said later that crews from all 106 LAFD stations inspected 470 square miles of the city and found no reportable damage, the newspaper said.
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