Small communities are reeling from a magnitude 7.1 earthquake - the second major quake in as many days to rock Southern California.
The quake jolted much of California, cracked buildings, set fires, broke roads and caused several injuries while seismologists warned that large aftershocks were expected to continue.
The New Zealand Consulate General in Los Angeles had no news of any New Zealanders affected by the earthquakes, a spokeswoman said on Saturday night. There are currently 1616 New Zealanders registered on SafeTravel as being in the US, 353 of them in California.
Are you a Kiwi who experienced the earthquake? Tell us what happened at newstips@stuff.co.nz.
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* In pictures: 7.1 magnitude earthquake shakes Southern California
* Strong earthquake rattles California
Aucklander Shirlyn Kumar was in Las Vegas with her family when the 7.1 quake hit.
"[It was a] very scary experience for us," she said.
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Shirlyn Kumar, second from left, with her husband, daughter and parents in Las Vegas.
"We had to take cover under tables as we were on the 29th floor and couldn't go downstairs."
The family had travelled to the United States to celebrate Kumar's daughter's 6th birthday. "We have tickets for Disneyland booked in Anaheim, however we are now too scared to go. We didn't sleep at all last night."
They also felt the magnitude-6.4 quake the day before, but Kumar said the magnitude-7.1 quake was noticeably stronger.
"It seemed to go on for quite a while ... It was rolling, the whole hotel was swaying.
"Thank goodness for all the drills in New Zealand as we all knew exactly what to do. Even our 5-year-old was the first one to drop, cover and hold."
Lane Hocking, from Wanaka, was in Los Angeles when the quake hit with his wife, Xiao, and two daughters Vaali, 10, and Coco, 8.
LANE HOCKING/SUPPLIED
Xiao Hocking (centre), and her two daughters Coco Hocking, 8, and Vaali Hocking, 10.
"We're staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and for the first quake our room was shaking violently and making a lot of unpleasant noises. We gathered under a doorway. There were people running down the hallway. It lasted about 30 seconds," he said.
For the second quake, they were watching Toy Story 4 at a movie complex.
"The quake hit very hard straight away and just kept going and going - at least forty seconds. The shaking was really violent."
Hocking said people started running out of the theatre, which can hold several hundred people.
"There was popcorn everywhere. There was a lot of panic and the darkness was freaking people out."
LANE HOCKING/SUPPLIED
Wanaka girls Vaali Hocking, 10, and Coco Hocking, 8, prepare to watch a movie in Los Angeles before the magnitude-7.1 quake hit.
Hocking said he had experienced many quakes in Japan when he lived there for five years, but "this was bigger than anything I felt there".
There were "significant reports of structure fires, mostly as a result of gas leaks or gas line breaks throughout the city" in Ridgecrest, a Mojave Desert town 240km away from Los Angeles, said Mark Ghillarducci, director of the California Office of Emergency Services.
MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/AP
Items are scattered around a kitchen following a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Ridgecrest, California.
There was a report of a building collapse in tiny Trona with about 2000 residents, not far from Ridgecrest. Roads were buckled or blocked, and police put out a call for bottled water for residents.There could be even more serious damage to the region that won't be known until first light on Saturday.
The quake - preceded by Thursday's 6.4-magnitude earthquake in the Mojave Desert - was the largest Southern California temblor in at least 20 years and was followed by a series of large and small aftershocks, including a handful above magnitude 5.0.
It hit at 8.19pm on Friday (3.19pm, Saturday NZT) and was centred 17 kilometres from Ridgecrest, which saw building damage, fires and several injuries from the earlier quake.
It was felt as far north as Sacramento, as far east as Las Vegas and as far south as Mexico.
There is about a 1-in-10 chance that another 7.0 quake could hit within the next week, said Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology and a former science adviser at the US Geological Survey.
The chance of a 5.0-magnitude quake "is approaching certainty", she added.
MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/AP
The Hope family of Ridgecrest, afraid to sleep inside, spends the night outdoors after the 7.1 magnitude earthquake.
However, the quake was unlikely to affect fault lines outside of the area, Jones said, noting that the gigantic San Andreas Fault was far away.
"These earthquakes are related," Jones said, adding that the new quake probably ruptured along about 25 miles of fault line.
The quake was felt as far north as Sacramento, as far east as Las Vegas and as far south as Mexico.
The area in and around Ridgecrest, already trying to recover from the previous quake, took the brunt of damage. Several thousand people were without power, and there were reports of cracked buildings.
Local fire and police officials said they were initially swamped by calls for medical and ambulance service. But there was "nothing but minor injuries such as cuts and bruises, by the grace of God," Ridgecrest Police Chief Jed McLaughlin said.
Two building fires - one involving a mobile home - were quickly doused, and there were several reports of natural gas leaks, but the lines were shut off, McLaughlin said.
For the second time in as many days, Ridgecrest Regional Hospital wheeled patients out of the building, some still hooked to IVs, CNN reported.
State Route 178 in Kern County was closed by a rockslide, and video showed a stretch of roadway had sunk. A fire at a mobile home park burnt several trailers.
But Kern County Fire Chief David Witt said there had been no immediate reports of building collapses or deaths, although injury reports sent paramedics scrambling.
MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/AP
Merchandise is scattered on the floor of a grocery store in Ridgecrest after the earthquake.
"We know of no fatalities. There have been a lot of ambulance calls for help," Kern County Fire Chief David Witt said at a news conference. "We're launching a lot of people ... I am very confident that we can take care of the situation."
San Bernardino County firefighters reported cracked buildings and one minor injury.
In downtown Los Angeles, 240km away, offices in skyscrapers rolled and rocked for at least 30 seconds.
Governor Gavin Newsom activated the state Office of Emergency Services operations centre "to its highest level". He had requested that US President Donald Trump issue an emergency declaration so the state could receive federal aid.
JESSICA WESTON/AP
A fire breaks out behind the Casa Corona restaurant following Friday's earthquake in Ridgecrest, California.
"The state is coordinating mutual aid to local first responders," he said.
Andrew Lippman, who lives in suburban South Pasadena, was sitting outside and reading the paper when Friday's quake hit.
"It just started getting stronger and stronger, and I looked into my house and the lamp started to sway. I could see power lines swaying," he said. "This one seemed 45 (seconds)... I'm still straightening pictures."
Firefighters around Southern California were mobilised to check for damage.
An NBA Summer League game in Las Vegas was stopped after the quake. Speakers over the court at the Thomas & Mack Center continued swaying more than 10 minutes after the quake.
CHAD MAYES/AP
Food that fell from the shelves litters the floor of an aisle at a Walmart following an earthquake in Yucca Yalley, California.
In Los Angeles, the quake rattled Dodger Stadium in the fourth inning of the team's game against the San Diego Padres.
The quake on Friday night happened when Dodgers second baseman Enrique Hernandez was batting. It didn't appear to affect him or Padres pitcher Eric Lauer.
STEVE MARCUS/AP
Officials confer after an NBA summer league basketball game between the New York Knicks and the New Orleans Pelicans was stopped due to Friday's earthquake.
"Everyone was jumping over us to leave," said Daniel Earle, 52, of Playa del Rey, who was sitting with his wife in the stadium's reserve level.
"People were freaking out," he said. "There was a concession guy, and he actually was really cool because he was really calm. He's like, `Relax. Tranquilo. Relax. Tranquilo,' and people were looking around."
"My wife was holding us, like squeezing. I'm surprised my arm is still here. She was squeezing into it so hard," Earle said.
Six Flags Magic Mountain in Santa Clarita said in a tweet on Friday night it had stopped running rides in the earthquake's wake.
"The safety of our guests and employees is our top priority and as a precautionary measure, we are conducting an extensive visual, structural, and operational safety checks on all of the rides before re-opening," the park said on Twitter.
Disneyland had evacuated rides as the park conducted safety checks, the Hollywood Reporter wrote. The park's mobile app had marked all rides as "temporarily closed" on Friday night.
MATT HARTMAN/AP
A damaged motorhome after Thursday's earthquake.
The quake came as communities in the Mojave Desert tallied damage and made emergency repairs to cracked roads and broken pipes from the earlier quake.
Hours earlier, seismologists had said that quake had been followed by more than 1700 aftershocks and that they might continue for years.
Jones said aftershocks from the new main quake could occur for three years.
ADAM GRAEHL/AP
Food was shaken from the shelves at a shop in Ridgecrest, California, by the earthquake on Thursday.
Earlier on Friday, Los Angeles had revealed plans to lower slightly the threshold for public alerts from its earthquake early warning app. But officials said the change was in the works before the quake, which gave scientists at the California Institute of Technology's seismology lab 48 seconds of warning but did not trigger a public notification.
"Our goal is to alert people who might experience potentially damaging shaking, not just feel the shaking," said Robert de Groot, a spokesman for the USGS's ShakeAlert system, which is being developed for California, Oregon and Washington.
The West Coast ShakeAlert system has provided non-public earthquake notifications on a daily basis to many test users, including emergency agencies, industries, transportation systems and schools.
Late last year, the city of Los Angeles released a mobile app intended to provide ShakeAlert warnings for users within Los Angeles County.
The trigger threshold for LA's app required a magnitude 5 or greater and an estimate of level 4 on the separate Modified Mercali Intensity scale, the level at which there is potentially damaging shaking.
Although Thursday's quake was well above magnitude 5, the expected shaking for the Los Angeles area was level 3, de Groot said.
MATT HARTMAN/AP
Pipes were damaged by Thursday's earthquake in Trona, California.
A revision of the magnitude threshold down to 4.5 was already underway, but the shaking intensity level would remain at 4. The rationale is to avoid numerous ShakeAlerts for small earthquakes that do not affect people.
"If people get saturated with these messages, it's going to make people not care as much," he said.
Construction of a network of seismic-monitoring stations for the West Coast is just over half complete, with most coverage in Southern California, San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle-Tacoma area.
Eventually, the system will send out alerts over the same system used for Amber Alerts to defined areas that are expected to be affected by a quake, de Groot said.
California is partnering with the federal government to build the statewide earthquake warning system, with the goal of turning it on by June 2021. The state has already spent at least US$25 million building it, including installing hundreds of seismic stations throughout the state.
JAMES QUIGG/AP
A child walks by one of the mobile homes in Ridgecrest that was knocked off its foundation by Thursday's earthquake.
This year, Newsom said the state needed US$16.3m to finish the project, which included money for stations to monitor seismic activity, plus nearly US$7m for "outreach and education." The state Legislature approved the funding last month, and Newsom signed it into law.
JAMES QUIGG/AP
Visitors look over a crack on Highway 178 between Ridgecrest and Trona, California, on Friday, before a bigger earthquake struck the state.
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