New York Magazine’s Big One
The December 11, 1995 issue of New York magazine also tackled the issue, talking with experts at length about the dangers of a big earthquake in Manhattan.
The riskiest local buildings: unreinforced masonry—our brownstones and walk-ups. Charles Scawthorn, who did a pioneering study on the possibility of a New York City quake for the New York Academy of Sciences in 1988 (to date, the only such study) imagines. “The streets would be filled with bricks. and you’d literally be looking up at a guy in his bathtub. That kind of comic-book scene. You’d just have bricks everywhere. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.”
It presents a humorous scene. But given everything we know about how disasters actually play out here in the 21st century, it probably wouldn’t be quite so funny to the people living through it.
