Another points out that landlines will still work when cellular service is down and directs people to higher ground when thereвЂ™s a tsunami warning. One character tells people to get under a table and hold. The main characters know exactly what to do when the big one hits. While seismologists panned the science in San Andreas, they praised its focus on preparedness. This technology doesnвЂ™t predict earthquakes but rather alerts affected residents that one has begun.Д«ut San Andreas got one thing right: you should prepare for an earthquake That said, some disaster preparedness experts advocate for an early warning systems that will alert people to an approaching earthquake. Seismologists wish they could discover a way to predict earthquakes, but most evidence suggests itвЂ™s impossible. He called it the вЂњholy grailвЂќ of seismology. But real-life Caltech assistant professor Jean-Paul Ampuero says predicting earthquakes is not something seismologists are even close to doing.

In San Andreas, Paul Giamatti plays a California Institute of Technology (Caltech) who has discovered the key to predicting when and where earthquakes can occur. Certainly, it wouldnвЂ™t cause damage to the White House as San Andreas suggests. A California earthquake could be felt on the East CoastДЄn earthquake in California may be felt in Nevada and other neighboring states, but it would never be felt on the East Coast. Read More: 3 Places Where the Next Big Earthquake Could HitД¤. But that tsunami would be much, much smaller than the one in the movie-which seems to swamp all of San Francisco-and only hit a very narrow part of the coast. ThereвЂ™s a small possibility that a California earthquake could trigger an offshore landslide, which might in turn trigger a small tsunami that hits California. ThatвЂ™s flat out impossible, seismologists say.

In addition to facing several earthquakes and a seemingly endless number of aftershocks, the characters in San Andreas have to confront a tsunami of gargantuan proportions. The earthquake triggered a massive tsunami But with Los Angeles essentially razed and San Francisco largely underwater or on fire, it seems like the potential devastation is beyond what could ever happen in real life.ДЈ. To be fair, the Rock never stops to give the audience precise death tolls or injury numbers-heвЂ™s too busy saving jumping out of a moving plane, out maneuvering a tsunami and, ultimately, saving his family. But those figures, while dramatic, seem small compared to the number of skyscrapers we see crumbling left and right and the countless people who burn, drown or fall from fatal heights in San Andreas. A total of five high-rises and 1,500 smaller buildings would be expected to collapse across the city. The San Andreas, a transform fault, is the meeting place of small tectonic plates that are slipping away from each other.ДЄ 2008 study found that a worst-case scenario earthquake of 7.8 magnitude in Southern California could cause $213 billion in damage and leave 1,800 people dead and 50,000 severely injured. But those have occurred only in subduction zones, where two plates meet and one sinks beneath the other. (Because of the logarithmic basis of the Richter scale, each whole number increase in the rating means a tenfold increase in the magnitude of the quake.) There have been much more powerful earthquakes, including a magnitude 9.5 in Chile in 1960, the largest ever. ThatвЂ™s 126 times weaker than the imagined earthquake in the movie. Geological Survey seismologist Lucile Jones.

An earthquake along the San Andreas fault couldnвЂ™t exceed a magnitude 8.2, according to U.S.

San andreas earthquake