February 19, 2023

China Lake Naval Ordnance Test Station, near the small town of Ridgecrest California

You didn’t think we forgot about the earthquakes and the “Man Camps” did you? Well no, we didn’t. And we don’t refer to the earthquakes as “The 2019 Ridgecrest, California, Earthquake Sequence“ either:

We call them China Lake’s “Secret” Earthquakes, but that’s another story, and they weren’t a secret. The earthquakes were at China Lake, and the epicenters were on the test ranges near Trona, not Ridgecrest. USGS could’ve called them the Trona Earthquakes, but we prefer the folklore of the Navy at China Lake in our naming conventions.

As to the cause of the earthquakes, look for a future post on possible “triggering mechanisms for earthquakes” and do a quick search on CL-20, MOAB, Bunker Busters and HAARP in the meantime. The cause is what makes them a “secret”.

We noticed that the Navy has opened their “Temporary Employee Housing” facility out by the Ridgecrest Animal Shelters. Over 250 trailers were set up in 2021 after the July 2019 earthquakes demolished various facilities on the base. Over 1,500 “rooms” are available and the “No Vacancy” sign is lit. Hotels are also full and their parking lots are overflowing with contractor’s work trucks.

There are five doors per 50′ trailer, and they look like they would serve nicely as 10×10 cells.

On July 4, 2019 at 10:34am local time, more than 47,000 people in southern California and as far away as northern California and Phoenix, Arizona felt shaking from an M6.4 earthquake centered 18.2 km (11.3 mi) WSW of Ridgecrest, California. The M6.4 had been preceded by a series of very small earthquakes (foreshocks) over the previous hour, including an M4.0 event about 30 mins earlier. But until the M6.4 occurred, no one knew that these smaller events were foreshocks.

US Geological Survey

The epicenters of both the M6.4 and M7.1 earthquakes of July 4th and 5th, 2019 were located on a secretive Navy base out in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert. The civilians on the base test big bombs and explosives like they’ve been doing for nearly 80 years. It’s the desert, it’s secretive, and nobody really knows what they do there.

Suffice it to say, they must know that we don’t believe anything they tell us, and even if we did know the how’s and why’s of what they do, we wouldn’t believe it. We’re both skeptical and cynical for a valid reason, it’s painted on a big sign at the entrance to the base.

Eric Bruen is the Mayor of Ridgecrest and he’s both a shrewd credit union CEO as well as a typically slimy big-spending politician. Bruen actually had the chutzpah to take credit for saving the China Lake from a BRAC while spending millions in Covid Relief Act money on parks and police cars.

In addition, he was able to cap off his first two-year term by dangling a carrot in front of the citizens children of Ridgecrest while promising a $9 million $14 million pool in return for a 1% Sales Tax increase. “I’m not a fiscal conservative” he said at last year’s council debate.

A recap of events leading up to the Man Camps and Mayor Bruen’s spending spree is in order as a lot has happened in the 3.5 years since the earthquakes.

The first earthquake struck when China Lake’s 4,000 civilian employees and contractors were all out of town (a 3 for 9 holiday) so the place was empty with exception of the handful of uniformed military stationed on base. Every geologist within 250 miles raced to the Mojave Desert to set up monitoring equipment and take selfies.

By the evening of July 4th geologists were in the field with boots on the ground to begin investigating the surface rupture in the vicinity of the M6.4.

Unfortunately, early reports from the Navy indicated no damages on the base. Everyone was relieved to hear there were no damages or injuries in Ridgecrest either. Unfortunately, the poor denizens of dusty and hotter-than-hell Ridgecrest weren’t off the hook just yet.

The Navy needed widespread damage and the M6.4 wasn’t powerful enough to do the pre-demolition work, and so less than 36 hours later another earthquake was scheduled and it was dialed up to a M7.1. That would be an earthquake eleven times stronger than the previous day’s M6.4.

Again, Ridgecrest suffered little to no damage, although some trailers in an old trailerpark were moved off their stands. For the Navy, the earthquakes were like manna from heaven and the M7.1 July 5th earthquake was just what was the DOD needed. (As you should know by now, we reserve the right to make outlandish conjecture.)

Mayor Bruen repeatedly thanked the Earthquake gods for their goodness and for NAWS China Lake, the earthquakes were truly a “blessing in disguise” as Bruen has repeatedly proclaimed.

Prior to the earthquakes, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake was a functionally obsolete, non-essential Navy base in the desert, and it would be saved by virtue of a $4 Billion bailout in reconstruction funding courtesy of Senator Diane Feinstein. Although she was completely demented at the time, she did have her common sense and questioned why the Navy would put a Navy base in the desert and not somewhere near an ocean, while Congressman Kevin McCarthy assured her it was worth $4 Billion in borrowed taxpayer money to rebuild the place and that Ridgecrest needed some economic growth. We think Kevin is demented too.

Although Bruen wasn’t Mayor at the time, he’s said that China Lake might have been closed if everyone (meaning he) hadn’t worked so quickly to snag the funding prior to the breakout of the Covid-19 bioweapon from the Wuhan lab in China.

We last reported on Ridgecrest’s Man Camps in July of 2020, a year after the earthquakes. However today, nearly 3 years later, we’re becoming a little concerned about what they’re going to do with all that temporary employee housing when the construction is finished in 2025 and the contractors leave town. We hope the Navy doesn’t pull a “Wherry” on us. Ahem.

To make a long story short, instead of locating the man camps in the City of Ridgecrest the Navy decided to locate in San Bernardino County on approximately 40 acres of land ideally suited for a prison or a FEMA concentration camp.

We don’t know what they’ll do, it’s likely a state secret. There’s no way DHS or FEMA would think of converting the “Ridgecrest Man Camps” to FEMA Quarantine Facilities for the “vax-deniers” would they? Don’t be stupid. It may be a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” but they can’t possibly think they’ll use the trailers as a quarantine facility. No way.

Sheltering specific populations in non-congregate shelters should be determined by a public health official’s direction or in accordance with the direction or guidance of health officials by the appropriate state or local entities.  The request should specify the populations to be sheltered. 

Sheltering solutions should be determined by the Applicant requesting assistance, such as hotels, motels, dormitories, or other forms of non-congregate sheltering. 

FEMA

Will “Temporary Employee Housing” become “Temporary Homeless Shelters” or condos for migrant refugees? We’ll leave it at that and ask Mayor Bruen if he has any plans for the camps. Until then, we eagerly await the completion of construction so the contractors can go home and Ridgecrest can say goodbye to the trailers.