VICE: So tell me about how the San Andreas fault can kill us.
Lucy Jones: I’m with something called the Science Application for Risk Reduction Project [SAFRR] at the United States Geological Survey, and one of the things that SAFRR does is create scenarios of big geologic disasters so people can prepare for them. We’ve gone through saying: “What’s a big San Andreas earthquake gonna be like?” and we even looked into the possibility that we could be triggering offshore landslides that could create a much smaller—but still damaging—tsunami.

You studied tsunamis like the one in the movie?
Well the tsunami [in the movie] was ridiculous, but they had a nice thing where the hero recognizes that the water being pulled out from the harbor is a sign that a tsunami is coming. And when the heroine knows the tsunami is coming, she does vertical evacuation to get away from it. She has to go all the way to the fifteenth floor though, which is not realistic.

Could a tsunami hit LA?
Actually, here in Southern California the San Andreas is far enough away from the ocean that [in tests] we couldn’t get big enough motion underwater to get a decent landslide, or any sort of tsunami. We also did a different scenario: an Alaskan earthquake creating a big tsunami. We were trying to make the worst one we could for Southern California, because basically our client was the Port of Los Angeles, and they wanted to understand what they should be preparing for. We had a hard time getting any tsunami close to this region.

We have a lot of nuclear waste here in California, kind of like in Fukushima. Is that a worry that’s not in the film?
Nuclear waste storage is sorta crazy. We aren’t willing to build repositories, so we leave it on an active fault. But it depends on how they’re being stored. Because of earthquake engineering, our buildings are a lot stronger and it takes very strong shakes to bring them down.

In a worst-case-scenario earthquake, what kind of building collapses would we see?

The reality is that it’s a relatively small percentage of the buildings. When we did an analysis, putting together all of our data about how buildings get damaged, and what are the buildings here in Southern California, we ended up estimating that 1,500 buildings would collapse.

But that’s a lot!
That’s out of about 5 million buildings. Only about one in every 5,000 buildings would actually collapse. It’s about one in 16 that would have damage exceeding ten percent of the value of the building. That’s not a level of damage you can see really clearly.

Would skyscrapers tip over sideways, like in the movie?
No, no. To fall sideways, you have to have an incredibly strong building to hold together, and only break at the bottom.

Has that ever happened before?
We’ve seen that once in Chile. There was a building that basically was quite good, except there was a defect on the first floor, and it ended up literally breaking off at the first floor and going sideways.

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