You may have been unfortunate enough to watch Dwayne Johnson in the movie San Andreas, the special FX not quite saving the movie from The Rock’s lack of acting chops, but the real-life event promises to be a humdinger.

A leading earthquake expert has said that the San Andreas Fault, which sits below southern California, is ‘ready to go’ and Los Angeles should ready itself for disaster.

More from TIME:

Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California…said the movement of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates should amount to a shift of about 16 ft. every 100 years. But the southern part of the fault has been quiet since a 7.9-magnitude quake hit in 1857 — too long.

“The springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight. And the southern San Andreas Fault, in particular, looks like it’s locked, loaded and ready to go,” Jordan said in the keynote speech of an earthquake conference in Long Beach, Calif.

Jordan praised efforts by officials in Los Angeles to prepare the city for the Big One by retrofitting buildings and bolstering water and telecommunications infrastructure, but the impact of a large quake could still be massive.

How massive? The U.S. Geological Survey said, back in 2008, that ‘a 7.8-magnitude quake on the southern San Andreas Fault would cause about 1 800 deaths and $213 billion worth of damage’.

Sorry folks, not even Dwayne can save you now.

[source:time]

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