Might help with the water crisis.
Posted on 05/25/2015 7:33:06 AM PDT by BenLurkin
U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough accompanied The Associated Press to an advance screening of the film. Despite the implausible plot, she said the San Andreas will indeed break again, and without warning.
"We are at some point going to face a big earthquake," she said.
The San Andreas is notorious for producing big ones, but a magnitude-9 or larger is virtually impossible because the fault is not long or deep enough, Hough noted.
The most powerful temblors in recorded history have struck along offshore subduction zones where one massive tectonic plate dives beneath another. The 1960 magnitude-9.5 quake off Chile is the current world record holder.
The San Andreas has revealed its awesome power before. In 1906, a magnitude-7.8 reduced parts of San Francisco to fiery rubble. Nearly five decades earlier, a similar-sized quake rattled the southern end of the fault.
In 2008, the USGS led a team of 300 experts that wrote a script detailing what would happen if a magnitude-7.8 hit the southern San Andreas. They wanted to create a science-based crisis scenario that can be used for preparedness drills.
The lesson: It doesn't take a magnitude-9 or greater to wreak havoc. Researchers calculated a magnitude-7.8 would cause 1,800 deaths and 50,000 injuries. Hundreds of old brick buildings and concrete structures and a few high-rise steel buildings would collapse.
...
If you're outdoors when the ground moves, experts recommend bracing against a wall, similar to what search-and-rescue helicopter pilot Ray Gaines, played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, told scared survivors in the movie.
"Having Paul Giamatti shouting, "Drop, cover and hold on!" and The Rock telling people to crouch against a wall if they can is one heck of a PSA," Hough said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
I've always been told that the western side of the San Andreas fault belonged to the pacific plate, while the east is part of the continental plate.
That sounds pretty deep and long to me.
Don't know about the second part of that advice. If you are outdoors, it would seem moving away from anything that can fall on you is the best advice.
I remember in school drills being told to stand in a doorway or get under a table. Well, I’m here to tell you that if the quake is bad enough to do these things, you probably can’t.
No doubt, the San Andreas can produce some pretty big shakers, but there’s other faults directly under Los Angeles that give geologists the heebie-jeebies more than the SA Fault.
The trailer for the movie is pretty over-the-top (to put it mildly) but then again, it’s a disaster movie, and generally, those tend to pretty over-the-top by the very nature.
My personal fave was 1974’s ‘Earthquake’, the one with Charlton Heston, Lorne Greene, George Kennedy and Richard Chamberlain; that was a pretty decent film - melodramatic, mind you - but the visual effects still hold up even now. The scene of the Columbia Records building shearing away if particularly well-done.
I grew up in Los Angeles, so needless to say, that flick made me a little paranoid when it popped up on TV a few years later, LOL.
Another CGI fest. There are scores of identical movies out there.
I can’t wait for Everest.
The SA is about a mile and a half from my house. Even a 7 is gonna rock us pretty good.
It should be a peak experience...
I love mountaineering stories.
Oh, you bet it would! Yeesh - that’d be some serious rockin’ and rollin’.
Might help with the water crisis.
Not nearly as deep as a subduction zone plate interaction, where one plate is being driven under another. In the case of SA, the 2 plates are merely sliding past each other.
1,800 deaths is nothing.
All I know is that I got earthquake insurance on our Hollywood Rockin’ the Wall Films suite.
San Andreas?
I didn’t do it.
It’s not my fault.
Wait?..what?...if you’re out brace against the wall?!!.
brick or cinder block walls are notoriously unsafe in quakes
If you’re out in the open and there nothing that can fall against to your safe being away from that.
the majority of danger in a quake is stuff falling or collapsing on you
well I’m not sure if it’s technically part of the one San Andreas fault...faults are like rivers with tributaries that forms a whole system
And i belive the main California fault ..system ..runs north out of San Francisco Bay into the ocean and south down the middle of the Gulf of California between Baja and mainland Mexico it to.the ocean
it why you have two long bays San Francisco Bay and Gulf of California at both ends of the fault.. they are the points the fault go off in to the ocean
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