“It was an intense jolt. When the big jolt stopped, it felt like the house was on rollers,” he told AFP.
“It was like when you throw a big stone in water and the ripples go out, it was like the earth was doing that.”
The US West Coast is the confluence of several of the Earth’s tectonic plates, and tremors are not uncommon.
The area has been struck by a number of major earthquakes, including a 1994 quake that hit Northridge, in the Los Angeles area, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, as it wrought billions of dollars of damage to homes and infrastructure.
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which also caused a tsunami, is thought to have killed upwards of 3,000 people, some of whom died in fires that erupted after the powerful tremor.
