Sunday, March 30, 2014

Staking Out The Damage From "La Habra Shakes"

Welcome to La Habra, home of...uh, La Habrans?
After attending the Huell Howser Day festivities at Chapman University on Saturday, The Militant, along with one of his operatives, decided to head up the 57 to La Habra and survey some damage from the previous night's La Habra Shakes quake-o-rama.

After exiting Imperial Highway and heading west (no, his operative was not a big nasty redhead), we looked intently for some earthquake damage. Perhaps some broken glass, perhaps a fallen masonry wall, anything to report to you, the blog-reading public!

The Militant drove and drove...hmm. Nothing.

We turned north on Beach Boulevard. The Militant spotted a cracked window at the True Value Hardware store on Beach Blvd and Lambert Road. Hmmm, maybe....

This may or may not be earthquake damage. No, really.
The "X"-shaped crack had some vinyl tape on the top two extremities. The tape looked clean and therefore relatively new, but its relationship to the earthquake cannot be determined for sure.

We drove on east on Whittier Blvd, discovering La Habra (of all places, right?) has an El Cholo Spanish Cafe, but NOT discovering any quake damage. We went into a residential neighborhood to see if there were any downed walls...nada.

We turned west on La Habra Blvd (we spotted two glass company trucks parked in a liquor store parking lot -- perhaps done with their installation), and back south on Beach. Right after leaving the La Habra city border at Hillsborough Drive, we spot some yellow police tape along the sidewalk just half a block south and...lo and behold...EUREKA!

We found damage! Woot!
At last, confirmed earthquake damage! This masonry wall fell over out into the sidewalk. And since people out in this part of town don't even bother to walk, you can rest assured that no one was hurt.

So there you go, we did not come up empty-handed after all! Yes, there was some damage from the #LaHabraShakes, but it wasn't very obvious. The town largely looked as if nothing happened. For those of you who did sustain damage, The Militant hopes it's manageable and all repairs are relatively easy and affordable.

If any of you spotted any quake damage, please share with The Militant in the comments or via email or Twitter!
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2 comments:

  1. GlenApril 5, 2014 at 11:38 AM

    It's likely the cracked glass is quake damage - X-shaped stress cracks are typical of stresses caused by quake shaking.

    When the ground moves, rectangular frames become parallelograms, causing the first diagonal cracking.

    Then it moves in the opposite direction, producing cracks on the opposite diagonal.

    X-shaped cracks are fairly unusual from most non-quake strains, since most strains just go one direction.

    No way to be certain, but it's a good bet it was the quake. :-)

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  2. AnonymousJune 4, 2014 at 10:38 AM

    The Mood store on La Brea in LA was actually red-tagged after this quake, as parts of the ceiling collasped

    ReplyDelete