4.3 Earthquake Rattles Los Angeles: A Dispatch from the Burbank Bureau

Was that a foreshock?

​There's nothing more disconcerting than those first moments of an earthquake. Is this the Big One? Is it going to get worse?

When you're almost 30 stories up in a building that's attached to bedrock (as I was), even a small earthquake, like the 4.3 earthquake that struck Newhall at 1:47 p.m. today, brings to mind the fact that it is a very, very long way to the ground.

The USGS initially assigned it a 4.2--hardly a flutter in Los Angeles terms, no matter how worried our East Coast brethren are about tiny quakes--and upgraded it to 4.3 about an hour later.

Most of Orange County didn't feel it, and no damage was reported, but the quake rattled windows from Tehachapi well into Los Angeles.