Months of aftershocks could follow big California earthquake

Antoun Abdullatif, 59, owns liquor stores and other businesses in Ridgecrest and Trona.

"I would say 70% of my inventory is on the floor, broken," he said. "Every time you sweep and you put stuff in the dust bin, you're putting $200 in the trash."

But he has stopped cleaning up, believing another earthquake is on the way.

Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology and a former science adviser at the US Geological Survey, said the new quake probably ruptured along about 25 miles (40 kilometers) of fault line and was part of a continuing sequence.

The seismic activity is unlikely to affect fault lines outside of the area, Jones said, noting that the gigantic San Andreas Fault is far away.

Egill Hauksson, another Caltech seismologist, said later in the day that scientists believe the continuing sequence could produce more than 30,000 quakes of magnitude 1 or greater over six months.

He said the probability of a magnitude 7 over the next week is about 3%, but one or two magnitude 6 quakes are expected.

AP