Summary
The area over which the shock was felt by persons at rest was 27,000 square miles or more, extending from Fresno on the north to San Diego on the south, and from Mojave to the coast.
The epicenter seems to have been near the summit of the Tejon Pass, where the intensity reached VII or a little more, of the Rossi-Forel scale.
At many places the shock was preceded by a pronounced roar like thunder or a high wind. Wherever the direction of the sound was noted it appeared to come from the epicentral area.
The region is too thinly populated and our data are too meager to enable us to outline the area of high intensity with confidence, but the following facts seem to be fairly well established:
The shock or shocks were produced by movement on the fault line that passes through the Tejon Pass and follows thence east-southeast along the axes of Leonas Valley and Anaverde Valley and northwestward through Cuddy Canyon and Cuddy Valley.
The topographic evidence of the fault in the Tejon Pass is very pronounced, but there is topographic evidence of another fault that branches off from the Tejon Pass fault about a mile and a half northwest of Tejon Pass and runs east-northeast from the northwest corner of Los Angeles county, passing along the north side of Castac Lake. The depression occupied by Castac Lake seems to have been formed by a downthrow on the south side of this fault.
It has been supposed that the fault through Tejon Pass was a southward prolongation of the San Andreas fault near San Francisco. The identity of these faults is far from being evident. The topography, the distribution of earthquake shocks, and the method of fracture along the fault zones all suggest a series of overlapping faults rather than one continuous fault.
Mr. Hamlin says on this subject: “This fault is not a long continuous fracture, but rather a fault zone with numerous branches. Dropped blocks are not uncommon along this zone, some being a mile or more wide and twice as long.”
The forms of the isoseismals of this particular earthquake, however, suggest definite relations to this fault zone.
