by Dennis Colonna
Two small earthquakes were felt in the South Bay area Tuesday morning.
The larger of the two events, measuring 3.0 on the Richter scale, occurred at 8:52 a.m., three miles west of Manhattan Beach, and was felt by some residents as a soft jolt. It was preceded by a smaller magnitude 1.9 quake 30 seconds earlier off the Palos Verdes Point.
An increasing number of small quakes have occurred off the South Bay coastline in the past year, but Mark Benthien of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC says it doesn’t necessarily portend a larger event for the immediate area.
“We are not terribly alarmed at this point, as a number of small earthquakes have been rattling most of Southern California in the past year. However, if we were to get a quake closer to the magnitude 4.0 range off the coast, we would become a little more concerned and monitor the situation a little more closely.”
Nick Sheckel, a seismologist with the Cal Tech Seismological Lab, agreed that a bigger quake would have to occur before the red flag would go up that something bigger was about to occur. ER
