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The temblor, which was centered one mile north of Fremont, hit about 2:41 a.m., USGS reported. ... The initial quake was followed by at least a dozen smaller ones and triggered a 15-to 20-minute delay on the area’s rail system before the morning commute, the Los Angeles Times reported. The largest of the smaller temblors was a magnitude 2.7.

Monday morning's magnitude 4.7 earthquake in Riverside County was the largest temblor to hit the Los Angeles region in three years and has produced more than 100 aftershocks. It caused no major damage, but it was felt over what seismologists said was an unusually large area. The quake was initially recorded as three separate quakes because a foreshock tricked seismographs into recording multiple quakes of multiple sizes, said Susan Hough, a USGS seismologist. Earthquakes of a 4.7 magnitude are typically only felt about 120 miles away from the epicenter, but Monday morning's quake traveled farther, shaking coffee cups as far...

PASADENA, Calif. A new computer model projecting a massive earthquake suggests that even buildings constructed in accordance with the latest codes would tumble in the Southland, it was reported Monday. Structural engineer Swaminathan Krishnan and his colleagues used Caltech’s large supercomputer and modeled what might happen if a massive earthquake rattled tall buildings in the Los Angeles area, the Pasadena Star-News reported. The results, researchers told the newspaper, are both a hint at the possible devastation of "the big one" and a starting point for future generations of even more accurate models. With the supercomputer, the researchers watched as a...