Up the down staircase
: Dateline is doing a panic piece on a tsunami hitting New York. So we had been thinking about ways to get down fast and now we need to get up fast. Or move to Kansas.
5 responses to “Up the down staircase”
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My tv’s messed up right now (vertical hold), so I’ll miss it. Dang, it would’ve been interesting to see all the things they get wrong.
A tsunami hits the U.S.’ east coast it would cause a lot of damage, for as far as the water penetrated. Heck, you can expect most of Manhattan to come through intact. Lots of damage on the lower floors, some smaller or poorly built buildings gone, but the larger, better constructed places should come through pretty much intact. Modern American buildings are steady things. Stay above the 5th floor and you should be ok.
If you’d like to stay on a coast, and avoid tsunamis, move to San Diego. We have a broad, gently sloping continental shelf. The effect is to ‘wear out’ a tsunami through friction. Poor things are naught more than pitiful remnants of their former glory by the time they reach shore. Heck, we get more damage when high tides and high surf coincide during a winter storm.
One final bit of advice. Carpets soaked in sea water are effectively unsalvagable. If the office building you work in is hit by a tsunami I’d recommend they get new carpeting and dispose of the old. -
“the larger, better constructed places should come through pretty much intact. Modern American buildings are steady things. Stay above the 5th floor and you should be ok.”
But no subway, thousands of cars piled up in the streets and smashed into storefronts, thousands of dead, intermittant or no utilities, maybe no clean water or any water above the 5th floor, no elevators . . . .
I don’t call that intact.
I was here for the blackout, which was only tolerable because it only lasted 2 days and no one died. No tsunamis, please! -
Yeah a tsunami in NYC would be horrible. I’d hate to imagine the impact on the subways.
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Yehudit, sorry to disappoint you, but it wouldn’t be total destruction. People would die, but not everybody. Damage would be done, but not everything would get destroyed. There would be survivors, there would be (mostly) intact buildings. You’ll just have to deal with the disappointment.
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IIUC, there’s really only one potential source for a tsunami to hit the eastern seaboard: La Palma, Canary Islands. If it were to all go at once, it might be rather messy. It could happen any time in the next 10,000 years… or it might go in small pieces, in which case it wouldn’t really matter. Worst case, it WOULD be total destruction.
There’s been a lot of hype about it. I’m not sure how valid it really is.
