I think my best option would depend on where I happened to be at the time the warning sounded. If I was at home (in Hoboken) I think scrambling up the Heights to Jersey City would be the best bet (probably at least 100 ft elevation difference). At work, probably just hang out on one of the top floors of my Midtown office and hope it doesn’t topple.
Another option would be to hijack the Hoboken ferry and take it out to deep water.
On the contrary. I answered this question yesterday. Recent simulations say the wave could reach around 12-15 miles inland. 
Since you might’ve missed it, there are some good links in my earlier post. In my opinion, the most interesting is the projection of the La Palma shock wave, and how it curls across the expanse of ocean in 6-8 hours…
:eek:
This is Houston, Space Shuttle, you’ve got a problem.
You think so? You’re going to hijack an open-sided boat with a top speed of 12 - 15 mph to get down the Hudson and out across 100 miles of ocean (since you need to get past the Continental Shelf) before this super wave makes it across the Atlantic at several hundred miles an hour?
I hope you luck is better than my luck.
(Even Gus is going to have to hope he can find a cigarette boat tied up in downtown NYC.)
Ouch. What a typo.
I don’t know about your train (I’m on the South Shore South Bend electric) but for 9/11 they were just pulling the trains up, loading, then sending them out - totally not the normal schedule, but as you said, folks waited their turns.
For the Tunnel Flood I was taking the bus and El, which run frequently anyway (at least it did back then) so while the trains and buses were packed nothing special was required to keep the vehicles coming.
I think the prior experience with the Tunnel Flood was also a factor - I remember a lot of people on 9/11 recalling that evacuation, so in a sense you had a large number of people who had been there before, had some idea how all this would work, and the concept wasn’t completely new. There was a certain trust we could move tens of thousands of people out of the busines district in just a couple hours without problems.
One bad incident could have precipitated a panic on 9/11 - a lot of people were on the edge because all we really knew at the time was that tall buildings in big cities were being targeted, and Chicago has five of the ten tallest buildings in the world.
Yeah, that’s another thing - on 9/11 it was a spontaneous exodus. No one official ever called for an evacuation, it’s just that 100,000 people all simultaneously decided they wanted to be someone else, got up, and left. You didn’t have to broadcast or disseminate information to the public at large, the public already knew and no one questioned that reducing the number of people in the immediate area was a good idea.
Very true - you can pull maybe a 100,000 out of a city like Chicago in a couple hours… but Chicago has 3,000,000 in the city as a whole. You can save a lot of people, but you’ll lose even more, LOTS more, than you’ll save.
Would you have to get a boat past the Continental Shelf to be safe? I cannot find depth charts online (unless I want to buy them) but my sense has always been you could get a few hundred feet of water under you by not going all that far from shore (I know shoals and such might rise here and there but broadly speaking). Granted a Megatsunami of epic proportions might well start rising in 400 feet of water but at that point wouldn’t it be more like the whole ocean rising than a breaking wave that would tip the boat? Or even a monster swell but still one that a boat could ride over?
I am honestly asking as I really have no clue what I would expect to see sitting in 400 feet of water a few miles offshore with a megatsunami hurtling at me (and hope I never do).
This is not the greatest bathymetric map of the New York Bight region, but it is the best I can find at the moment without a rotated view or vertical exaggeration. Note that you have to go out pretty far - nearly a hundred miles or so in most cases - to reach water more than 300 feet (~92 m) in depth (the lightest blue shading), and more than that to reach the boundary between the very gently sloping shelf and the steep sloping continental slope (darker shades of blue indicating 500+ feet (~154 m) depth, bounded by the near-black abyssal plain). The continental slope itself is extremely narrow here in comparison to the shelf.
Whatever the size of the tsunami is in the open ocean, once it reaches the edge of the continental slope, its speed rapidly decreases and height increases. That’s because the bottom of the wave begins to drag on the sea floor, so the energy of the wave is compressed and the water is pushed up. When this process happens quickly (e.g., with a steep, narrow continental slope), the wave will break. In the case of our tsunami, that wave breaking is not going to prevent the wave from heading further shoreward and causing more havoc (although the shallow slope of the continental shelf will rob it of some energy through friction). Even if we assume that the tsunami on the open sea is “surfable,” I sincerely doubt that any ship would survive an encounter once the wave hits the continental slope, builds and breaks, so you would have to try for the open ocean and its enormous swells… which could still be in excess of 150 feet (~50 m), as per El Cid Viscoso’s cite.
Personally, I think I would rather run like hell inland rather than try the ocean route.
Have you seen The Perfect Storm? The fishing boat Andrea Gail is thought to have been swamped by a 100-foot wave during that storm, and the movie shows how that might have happened. Yes, it’s all CGI but… damn. Just damn. It would give you a little taste of what to expect, I think.
No. A “tonne” is the same as a metric ton in the SI system, or 2204.6 pounds, or only about 10% larger than a U.S. ton.
Not that it makes much difference when you’re talking about 500 billion of them.
wolfman’s comment probably has to do with “trillion”. Tonne is not a term used often in the US, so it’s not likely an American trillion but six additional zeroes on the right.
I must have thrown that trillion in just to make it harder. . .Billion is a different number on each side of the Atlantic as well.