Westside tweets about second light quake in a week *

Tonight's Beverly Hills-epicentered light earthquake a few minutes ago was much like Monday morning's, but thankfully earlier: short in duration, sharp in intensity if you happened to be nearby, and heavily tweeted by LA journalists despite the lack of damage or actual news. The USGS measurements call it a preliminary 3.5. Go back to bed. It's the lengthy, rocking, violent quakes that you have to worry about, not the little neighborhood shakers.

On a shake map, blue is always good. Blue is very good:

* But noted: Though small and shallow, and thus widely felt, both of this week's quakes under Beverly Hills struck at the intersection of two of the faults criss-crossing Los Angeles with the potential for serious earthquakes. The Santa Monica fault runs along Santa Monica Boulevard (notice the elevation change on the two sides of SM Boulevard just west of Century City.) The Newport-Inglewood fault, the north-south fault that ends when it hits the generally east-west Santa Monica, is one we all should know about. From a Friday story on the LA Times website:

The Newport-Inglewood fault, beginning just off the Orange County coast and extending 50 miles northwest through Long Beach, Inglewood and into West Los Angeles, has been the subject of dire quake scenarios because it runs directly under some of the most densely populated areas of Southern California.

Movement along the southern part of that fault caused the 1933 Long Beach quake, a 6.3 temblor centered off Newport Beach that killed 115 people, mainly in Long Beach and Compton. That was the second-largest number of fatalities in a California temblor in recorded history. Damage to school buildings caused by that quake led to major steps toward earthquake-resistant construction in the state.