Disaster Experts Estimate $160 Billion Cost From Avengers Battle
We’ve all watched them, those superheroes and their epic battles. We’ve cheered them on even though we know they are going to win in the end but the one thing that we don’t think about is how much is it going to cost to fix the destroyed city?
In the Avenger’s movie we see the almost total destruction of Midtown Manhattan and while it looks awesome in the movie the devastation has to be fixed so that the city can return to normal. You can be pretty sure that the cost would be astronomical but The Hollywood Reporter decided to see if a dollar amount could be put to the cost of returning the city to all its glory.
To do this they reached out to Kinetic Analysis Corporation (KAC), which is the leading disaster cost prediction and assessment firms in the U.S., to see what they could come up with for a dollar amount.
So using computer models that KAC used for predicting the destruction of nuclear weapons, the team, lead by Chuck Watson and Sara Jupin figured out that the total cost of the battle would be in the neighborhood of $160 Billion.
To give you an idea of how much that is the attacks of 9/11 cost $83 Billion, Katrina cost $90 billion, and the tsunami in Japan caused $122 billion in damage.
Although many buildings in the fight’s East Midtown arena suffered extensive structural damage, most were limited to the more superficial destruction of windows, facade and some interiors. Those buildings that had their tops crushed, though, would be especially costly and timely to fix, as would be Grand Central Station, through which a warship crashed.
“The extensive damage to Grand Central Terminal could prove highly disruptive,depending on the sub-surface damage to the subway system,” KAC notes. “Although such damage is unlikely, as the 9/11 events showed, collapsing buildings can cause significant damage to sub-surface infrastructure such as gas, communications, and electrical systems. Detailed site surveys will be required to assess the state of the subterranean infrastructure.”
Now given the number of superhero movies in the pipeline I think it might be an idea to up those insurance premiums eh.
image courtesy of THR
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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