‘It was the scare of my life’ — when the ground began shaking in Ridgecrest

Reporting from Ridgecrest, Calif. —  The Chambers family was in holiday mode when the shaking began.

Jazmin Chambers was cooking bacon and eggs. Her husband, Kevin, and 5-year-old daughter, Kailyn, were frosting a cake for a July Fourth party. Then, pictures on the wall of their Ridgecrest house started falling. A drinking glass shattered. The refrigerator moved.

The family and everyone else in Ridgecrest and throughout Kern County had an unexpected Fourth of July guest: a magnitude 6.4 earthquake, the largest to hit Southern California in nearly two decades.

Jazmin, 34, was rattled. A Texas native, she had only seen earthquakes on TV and in the movies. She and her husband are military veterans who moved to Ridgecrest last year from Washington to raise their growing family.

“Oh my gosh, it was the scare of my life,” she said. “Afterward, I couldn’t even concentrate. My body was shaking.”

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Her infant daughter slept through it. Kailyn resumed her cake-frosting duties as soon as the rattling stopped. Her husband joyfully dubbed it The Independence Shake Down.

“We’re proceeding as normal,” he said a few hours later. “I got the chicken, some steaks, some pork chops we’re going to put on the grill. I don’t think that’s going to stop the show.”

Striking at 10:33 a.m., the quake was centered about 125 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert’s remote Searles Valley, near where Inyo, San Bernardino and Kern counties meet.

Officials with the Kern County Fire Department said there were no major injuries reported as of Thursday afternoon, just cuts and bruises. Authorities in Ridgecrest responded to dozens of calls for help, ranging from medical assistance to structure fires.

Patients at Ridgecrest Regional Hospital were evacuated as a “cautionary measure while inspectors searched the property for signs of damage,” said Jayde Glenn, the hospital’s marketing director. Twenty-five patients were taken by helicopter and ambulance to other medical facilities in Palmdale, Lancaster and Bakersfield, she said.

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In Ridgecrest on Thursday afternoon, gas stations were mobbed with cars as people tried to fill their tanks with gasoline after the earthquake. The electricity was out in parts of town, and traffic lights weren’t working, causing traffic jams.

Jim Simmons, 69, a lifelong resident of Ridgecrest and a consultant at the hospital, said he was sitting in a chair at home Thursday morning when he heard a crack and some groaning. His entire house started swaying.

“It rocked me out of the chair and onto the floor,” he said. “Looking up, I saw framed pictures and CDs falling off the walls and the shelves on all sides.”

He stepped outside and saw two plumes of smoke, including one curling above a house a few blocks away. He walked to the house and stood among several neighbors who watched, feeling helpless, as it burned. He rushed to the hospital to volunteer in case it needed help.

“When I arrived, I was immediately pressed into service,” he said. “The hospital was completely full of fire trucks, paramedics, helicopters on the ground and in the air. What a scene.”

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At the Minit Shop, a Ridgecrest Boulevard convenience store, the floors were littered with cans of hairspray, diapers, cans of beer and kibbles of pet food. Workers swept up broken glass and wiped off items to see what they could salvage and put back on the shelves. The smell of spilled wine hung in the air.

“Oh, God!” said one customer who headed to the back of the store and saw pools of red wine on the floor.

Javaid Waseem, who owns the store along with his brother, was at home and rushed to Minit Shop when the earthquake hit. The brothers immediately shut off their gas lines to the pumps outside, closed the store and called in extra employees to clean up the mess.

When they opened the gas pumps a few hours later, a steady stream of customers came to fill their tanks, wary of another earthquake.

“This is the first time I’ve seen this since I moved to California,” said Waseem, 45, who moved to Ridgecrest from New York in 2006. “I’m glad we are safe, but the damage inside the store — it’s going to take time.”

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Barbara Butler, 90, was shopping in the Dollar Tree at China Lake and Ridgecrest boulevards when the temblor hit. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular and was just getting in her daily steps when she felt a jolt and saw a shelf of cleaning supplies come toppling down.

Butler walks with a cane and was able to maneuver out of the way before the shelf crashed to the floor. The lights went out.

“I could feel a little tremor,” Butler said. “‘Huh, we’re having a little shaker.’ And then — whammo! — you got the big one. I quickly, as quickly as a 90-year-old can move, went down an aisle a little bit. I got splashed with stuff.”

Other customers helped her to her car, and she rushed home to check on things.

She said a collection of glass cups and saucers that had belonged to her mother was destroyed, as was an antique case that housed them. “But they’re just things,” said Butler, who has lived in the area for 50 years.

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Oscar Pineda, 41, of Ridgecrest and his family were heading out of town after hearing repeated predictions on television of possible large aftershocks to come.

“After a hundred aftershocks, we’re outta here,” he said as he his wife and their two young sons packed the family car and headed to spend the night with a relative in Lancaster.

They were in their backyard when the shaking began. “My sons were wide-eyed and wondering out loud, nervously, ‘Daddy what’s happening?’” Pineda said.

“I was honest with them. I said: ‘The Earth is shaking. It’s an earthquake.’ But my 6-year-old wasn’t satisfied. ‘Why, Daddy? Why is the ground shaking?’ I said, ‘Every once in a while God shakes up the world.’ He looked up at me and said, ‘Well, OK Daddy.’”

Sahagun and Díaz reported from Ridgecrest, Serna and Branson-Potts from Los Angeles.