KTLA-TV broadcasters ducked for cover live on the air and immediately announced that an earthquake was occurring in Los Angeles basin Monday in a video which has gone viral, according to CNN.
Anchors at KTLA-TV took cover underneath their desk before quickly resuming the broadcast by seeking USGS information, CNN reported. The 4.4-magnitude quake was centered 2 miles from Encino and 15 miles west-northwest of the downtown civic center, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Los Angeles police and fire officials said there were no immediate reports of damage, according to CNN.
The 6:25 a.m. quake occurred at a depth of about 5 miles. There were several aftershocks, including one of 2.7 magnitude that caused very minor shaking, CNN reported.
The quake was felt as far away as Orange County to the south and Santa Barbara to the north, according to CNN.
It was one of the largest to hit Los Angeles since the 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake killed several dozen people and caused $25 billion in damage two decades ago, USGS seismologist Lucy Jones told KABC-TV, CNN reported.
The quake was somewhat unusual because of its location within the Santa Monica Mountains, a 40-mile-long range that crosses Los Angeles and stretches west through Malibu to Ventura County, according to CNN.
Seismologist Egill Hauksson, a veteran researcher at Caltech, said it was the only magnitude-4.4 temblor within the range since recording of earthquakes began, CNN reported.
"The Santa Monica Mountains are a very old rock formation, hundreds of millions of years old, and we sort of think of it as being a very rigid block. And the earthquakes tend to cluster either north of them or south of them but don't seem to be occurring within the mountains," he told a Caltech news conference, according to CNN.
Southern California has been in a seismic lull since significant quakes of the 1980s and 1990s, CNN reported. Whether Monday's quake signaled an end to that "earthquake drought" won't be known for many months because it takes a long period to show whether the rate of activity has changed.
