>On January 17, 1994, I was immediately awakened by an early morning morning earthquake. 4:31 AM to be exact.

When the earthquake struck, I was safe in my bed in Orange County.
I worked in Calabasas - near the center of the earthquake.
I really don't remember anything about the day of the quake - must have been uneventful.

The next day I went to work
I saw the weirdest things on the way to work.

There was a Contractor's License School next to the freeway.
It was a 2 story office building with a large sign on the roof - well, sort of on the roof.
The roof was supposed to be flat, but since the outside wall was torn off, the roof was drooping and the sign was leaning over maybe 25 or 30 degrees.
With the outside wall torn off, you were looking directly into someone's office.
There was one of those old fashioned steel desks, a chair, a file cabinet with the top drawer open.

It stayed that way for months, just hanging there.
I always wondered if the chair was going to just roll out and fall 2 stories.

The Nordstrom store at the mall was even weirder.
The stonework on the second story outside wall was gone, the inside of the wall was gone too, but the studs were there.
Looking through the studs, you saw all the racks of clothes and stuff - very ordinary looking.

We cleaned up the office as best we could.
The drop ceiling fell apart in the quake and there were some flourescent lights hanging low.
We had one quake related injury when one of our programmers forgot to duck and sliced his scalp on the mess that had been the ceiling.
We went right back to work in our wrecked office - we had a project to get done!

Our best programmer had his birthday the day after the quake and the boss brought us all out to dinner in the evening.
We ate outside on a covered patio.
There were a few aftershocks while we were having dinner, and all the dust got knocked loose from the patio cover and just sort of floated down towards our dinners.

These aftershocks were BIG 6.0 and 6.1 earthquakes.
We just rolled with it and went back to eating.
After the first aftershock, we learned to cover our food while the dust floated down.

The aftershocks made news for a few days, but after a while they just stopped reporting.
For the next few weeks, there were 100s of big aftershocks 5s and 6s that would ordinarily be big news all by themselves.

Why is one 6.0 earthquake big news, but 100s of 5.0 and 6.0 earthquakes are not?