A 5.4-magnitude quake struck southern California on Tuesday shaking buildings, rattling windows and chandeliers and sending people running into the streets. Although considered a moderate earthquake, it was the strongest tremor to hit a populated area of Southern California in more than a decade.

The earth quake was felt from Los Angeles to San Diego and as far as Las Vegas to the east, 230 miles away. The tremor was followed by approximately 30 aftershocks, but fortunately there were no reports of injured people, local authorities said. The largest aftershock was estimated at 3.8.

The tremor’s center was 29 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles near Chino Hills, a San Bernardino County city of 80,000 which was build about a decade ago with the latest in earthquake-resistant technology.

The shaking which took several seconds caused panic among people and determined authorities to evacuate some office buildings. Experts said that if a similar earth quake would have taken place in another part of the world, the consequences of the shaking would have been devastating, but due to the relatively strict building codes, the region’s infrastructure most predisposed to quake damage (homes, schools, freeways and rail systems) resisted the magnitude 5.4 tremor.

The most affected were phone and Internet systems, which had difficulty coping with the overwhelming demand in the minutes after the shock.

Compared to the devastating, magnitude-6.7 Northridge earthquake which struck the area on Jan. 17, 1994, the 5.4-magnitude quake which hit at 11:42 a.m. Tuesday had only 1 percent of the first one’s energy, said Thomas Heaton, director of the earthquake engineering and research laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. A stronger tremor (7.1 on the Richter scale) hit the desert area in 1999.

Caltech seismologist Kate Hutton said that people have forgotten how earthquakes feel like and described the last quake as an earthquake drill.

“It's a drill for the `Big One' that will be coming some day," Hutton said according to The Associated Press.