This stems from a conversation my wife and I had about how heavy snow is, and what the impact would be on Los Angeles if a blizzard were to hit. We guessed that a not-insignificant number of houses would collapse due to flat roofs not designed to hold the weight of that much snow. Extreme loss of a power and a lack of equipment to clear the roads would probably render the city helpless for days. There’d probably be a number of folks who would freeze to death. And with closed businesses, it’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be a lot of looting.
So take a major city in the US (well, the world, I suppose). Imagine a type of natural disaster that you believe the city would be ill-prepared for, and describe what you think would happen to that city as a result. Why would the city be so poorly prepared for the particular disaster of your choosing? How long would it take to recover? Would there be irreparable damage? How many dead?
Well, New Orleans was really unprepared for Katrina, so there’s that.
However, you seem to be headed for a “city that gets a disaster that’s totally out of the running” as opposed to “a city that just incompetently handles a disaster when it happens and was slack about prepping for a known threat”.
Therefore, I give you San Antonio TX, 1985, 13 inches of snow in 24 hours, plus another 3 the next day. The mayor got on radio and TV, told everyone to stay home, shut down the city. If there were any power outages I don’t remember them. People stayed home, the city got on with cleaning up. There were a lot of car accidents due to stupid TX drivers. Other than that, not much happened. Henry Cisneros was a a good mayor and the city kept rolling (I know he had problems later but he was really good as a mayor)
I have to assume that one, good, solid earthquake would be a Very Bad Thing for Venice. They’re having enough trouble keeping the city afloat as it is. Likewise a tidal wave or hurricane for the Netherlands; it’s already below sea level.
"A definitive answer to whether the object retroactively classified as 2015 SU[sub]2[/sub] could have been somehow detected and diverted is not, and may never be known. Certainly there were no extant NEO detection arrangements even remotely comparable to our contemporary UNATLAS, Spaceguard, or Heavenly Mantlet programmes; and even a miraculous discovery of the relatively small (60m) iron-nickel bolide with plausible time to spare may not have been enough to spur responsible parties of the time into any kind of action—even if the true direness of the situation had been impressed, any effective action against such an object would have certainly required the unpalatable—in that gentler time—use of nuclear arms, which would likely caused any credible political leader of the era to, sadly, balk.
An evacuation of the future Mahshar zone is a more plausible course of events, but perhaps only by comparison. The exceedingly tragic timing of the impact found the metropolitan area more than doubled; and an equally tragic conclusion most modern historians, sociologists, and even religious authorities admit, is that many of the faithful would have refused to leave. There is credible doubt that even if warning of the calamity had been gained months, or even years in advance, that a cancellation or even postponement of the pilgrimage could have been enforced—a famed series of war games at the Federal Defence College (Canberra) have even suggested that any attempt at same, given the volatile geo-socio-political situation at the time might simply have precipitated the series of events that followed…
In any case, there was no interception, no evacuation, and no warning on that fateful day at Mecca, on the first day of The Last Hajj, when 2015 SU[sub]2[/sub] fell blazing to Earth at 30000 meters per second…"
—The Third World War (Vol. 1), Osprey Publishing, 2036
LA has done a good job handling large riots and earthquakes and currently the water shortages. NYC handled 9/11 and the next years power outages very well.
I was going to point that out, although not about Michigan specifically. Much of the country just isn’t built to handle earthquakes. One thing I recall reading about on the subject is that you’d have things like the brick facing on many buildings falling off and crushing people on the street.
Skyscrapers would generally survive well; they are designed to flex in the wind, which usually helps them survive earthquakes. On the other hand, concrete constructions tend to shatter; their high mass actually makes them more vulnerable.
I just read a good article that the blizzards of 1888 and all the problems they caused (over 400 dead, massive loss of economic opportunity) caused a major shift in what voters and taxpayers expected from their city governments. It was right after those that NYC began building its subways and began building conduits to run electrical lines because above ground transportation and electrical lines had all been knocked out by the heavy snowfalls and drifting snow (up to 50 feet in a couple places).
Any place that has a lot of brick buildings would do poorly in an earthquake. Most earthquake damage is done by side-to-side movement, and bricks don’t have much shear strength. So if, say, Boston were hit with a 7.0, many of the brick buildings would be severely damaged, and some of them would collapse completely. A quick Google search shows that a lot of Boston’s fire stations, police stations and hospitals are made of brick, so emergency services would be disrupted. Fires often break out after a big quake, and these fires would be hard to fight if power were disrupted and water mains were broken. If the fires got bad enough, they might have to fight them from the air. I assume Massachusetts has systems to do this, but they’re probably not as good as what we have on the west coast (with our frequent forest fires).
Cities on the west coast of the U.S. wouldn’t do well in a hurricane. Our buildings aren’t designed to withstand high winds. Most of our power lines are above ground, and they can’t take high winds either, so there would be widespread power outages that would last a long time. There would be downed trees all over the place. There would be a lot of flooding.
San Francisco, with its steep hills, would have special problems with a blizzard. You wouldn’t be able to get up some of those hills even with four-wheel drive. Maybe the cable cars would be able to get to the top of Nob Hill, since they don’t rely on ground traction.