New Line Finds Fault With "San Andreas 3D"

New Line Cinema confirms they are circulating the screenplay "San Andreas 3D", written by Jeremy Passmore, Andre Fabrizio and Allan Loeb, out to directors, for a big-budget, $100 million plus, SFX feature.

Described as a full-scale disaster picture, with parts of California sinking into the Pacific Ocean, the film will have the same theme as the 1974 'Sensurround' feature "Earthquake".

The actual "San Andreas Fault", a continental strike-slip fault, runs a length of roughly 810 miles (1,300 km) through California. It forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. The fault was first identified in Northern California by UC Berkeley geology professor Andrew Lawson in 1895 and named by him after a small lake which lies in a linear valley formed by the fault just south of San Francisco, the Laguna de San Andreas.

A study completed in 2006 demonstrated that the San Andreas fault has been stressed to a level sufficient for the next 'big one', with a magnitude earthquake, 7.0 or greater. The study also concluded that the risk of a large earthquake may be increasing more rapidly than researchers had previously believed. While the San Andreas Fault had experienced massive earthquakes in 1857 at its central section and in 1906 at its northern segment (the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), the southern section of the fault has not seen a similar rupture in at least 300 years.

If such an earthquake were to occur, it would result in substantial damage to Palm Springs and a number of other cities in San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties in California, as well as Mexicali municipality in Baja California.

Such an event would be felt throughout much of Southern California, including densely populated areas of metropolitan Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, Ensenada, Tijuana, Baja California, San Luis Rio Colorado in Sonora and Yuma, Arizona.

Information available suggests that the fault is ready for the next big earthquake but exactly when the triggering will happen and when the earthquake will occur nobody can tell.

Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Earthquake"...