Quakes Shake Several Parts of State but Do Little Damage

A series of minor to moderate earthquakes shook widely separated areas of California from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Coachella Valley in a five-hour period Friday but caused no significant damage or injury, authorities reported.

Some of the temblors in the magnitude-3 range shook a large part of the Bay Area but were felt only as a small jolt before the start of the Bay Bridge baseball series in Candlestick Park. They were eerily reminiscent of the much larger 7.1 quake that struck Oct. 17 just before the start of a World Series game in the same park between the same teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics.

The largest temblor Friday, a 4.5-magnitude shaker, struck about 7 p.m. 20 miles southeast of San Francisco on the Concord Fault near Danville .

An earlier Danville shaker, measuring 3.5 magnitude, hit at 1:55 p.m. In an area badly mauled by the killer October quake, it caused shattered nerves, knocked cans and bottles from market shelves and in some cases sent customers running in panic from stores. However, no significant damage was immediately reported and there were no injuries.

A sportswriter at Candlestick said: “We mostly looked around at each other and said, ‘Was that what I thought it was?’ It was just a small jolt, but it was unsettling because of the Big One.”

In Walnut Creek, near Danville, customers at a Lucky supermarket ran out when cans and boxes tumbled from the shelves, store manager Gary Earl said. Tracy Hein, of the Contra Costa County Office of Community Services near Danville, said, “It was more like a truck hitting the building.”

Bay Area Rapid Transit trains that connect San Francisco with the East Bay suburbs were halted for five minutes as a precaution.

At 6:07 p.m., a 4.1-magnitude temblor, apparently unrelated to the Bay Area shaker, struck an isolated Coachella Valley desert area eight miles north of Indio, but did not even shake merchandise off store shelves there and got only passing attention in nearby Palm Springs, which is filled with college revelers on spring break.