Continued ftorn Page OneIn Tucson, Elizabeth Woods was awakened by her husband, Kenneth, after the room started shaking at their house near I10 and West Valencia Road.
"He was sitting on a couch that is extremely heavy and his lap was moving the opposite way that his arms were," Woods said. "He thought there was something wrong with his body, like he was having a heart attack or something."
. Woods said a couple came into the Insurance office where she works yesterday to report damage to their septic tank as a result of the earthquake.
I "Whatever the ground did caused their septic to back up and fill both of the tubs in their home," Woods said.
Amtrak's Southwest Chief, en route from Chicago to Los Angeles, derailed near Ludlow, more than 125 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Fbur of the 155 passengers on the train suffered minor Wuries.
"Our saving grace was, we were following a freight train," said Glenn Morton, the conductor. "We were going 60 mph instead of the 80 mph we normally would do through here."
All the homes in a nearby mobile home park were shoved off their foundations.
"Everybody was running out. The dogs
were howling. The cats were hiding. And the kids were freaking," said Barbara Houseworth, 19, who fled her trailer with her 3-year-old child. "When mobile homes rock, they really rock."
A concrete bridge over Interstate 40 had large cracks, but the highway remained open. Merchandise flew off shelves, and at least one supermarket was left with structural damage. Small brush fires were ignited by downed power lines in Palm Springs.
Light damage was also reported on the sprawling Marine Air Ground Combat Center south of Ludlow in Twentynine Palms, including broken water and gas lines.
The quake - named "Hector" after the mineral mining site where it was centered - began at 2:46 a.m. about 32 miles north of Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert, according to the California Institute of Technology. Aftershocks followed by the hundreds, including strikes of 5.8, 5.3 and 5.0 magnitude.
Thousands more aftershocks are expected, but there is only a 5 percent chance that a quake bigger than the original will strike in the next week, said Lucy Jones, chief seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's office in Pasadena.
It was the second huge earthquake in the region in only seven years. The magnitude-7.3 Landers earthquake in 1992 killed one person, injured 400 people and caused
nearly $100 million in damage. The Hector quake hit about 30 miles northeast of the Landers epicenter.
Authorities in Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area said there were no reports of