Quake rattles S. Calif.

Buildings sway, but no serious injury, damage

"When it started, I felt the shaking under my feet," she said. "I thought I was going to die. But my teacher told us to calm down." Her brother, Jayden, 5, piped in that he thought it was a "Tyrannosaurus rex walking."

The aftershocks cracked the walls and floors of homes and buildings in nearby Diamond Bar, said Lt. John Saleeby, the watch commander in the Los Angeles County sheriff's office in that town.

Elizabeth Cespuglio, 17, of Corona, about eight miles from the epicenter, was watching television and working on her computer when the shaking began. She ran to a doorframe, as experts advise.

"I always kind of liked quakes when they were tiny," she said by telephone. "But after it lasted longer, it kind of freaked me out." Two pictures fell from a wall in an adjacent bedroom but they did not break, and she did not see any other damage to the home. The quake was the largest in Southern California since a 7.1 magnitude quake hit an unpopulated area of the high desert in 1999.

The last powerful earthquake in urban Los Angeles - among the most seismically active regions in the world - struck in 1994 and was centered in Northridge, a section of the city in the San Fernando Valley.