A Vernon family vacationing in Las Vegas must have thought they were in the Elvis suite at their hotel Thursday morning.
Shayla Carson, her sister Thi and her mom Nisay were sleeping on the 12th floor of their hotel when they were “all shook up.”
“We got woken up by… I thought somebody was shaking our bed,” Carson said.
“We woke up, and we were looking around, and we realized the entire hotel room was waving. It wasn’t rumbling, it was wavering. It was kind of scary.
The 6.4-magnitude quake struck at 10:33 a.m. in the Mojave Desert, about 240 kms northeast of Los Angeles, near the town of Ridgecrest, California. It is the strongest quake to hit the region in 20 years. The United State Geological Survey initially said it measured at a 6.6 magnitude.
Quake rattles So-Cal
Carson said the shaking felt like it lasted 20 or 30 seconds.
“We noticed that the clothes hangers in the closet were rattling and shaking pretty vigorously,” she added.
“My mom went out into the hallway and noticed there was a lot of other people in the hallway and the manager was coming through saying that an earthquake did, in fact, happen and the elevators would be shut down.”
Carson said it was pretty crazy to be woken up like that.
“We thought maybe people were partying so hard for the fourth of July that it was shaking our room,” she said.
There was no visible damage to the hotel, although Carson said some ceiling tiles likely became dislodged on the main floor in the main casino room.
“We did notice some guys on ladders in the big casino part of the hotel,” Carson said. “There looked to be some stuff hanging down from the ceiling and it looked like they were trying to fix that.”
This trip was Nisay’s first time travelling in 30 years, and Shayla said it will be a memorable trip.
