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...oh, hey, there it goes.

Anyhow, this thread here is for discussing plotstuff, characters, and world info OOCly. Everything else goes to the OOC room.

2am on a Sunday morning, so weekend. Of course, recovery efforts started pretty much immediately, and there was (as said) some serious disruption of business in the areas nearest the quake. I'd put it around a 7.2 on the Richter scale--ordinarily that wouldn't open up massive fissures in the ground, but the Abyss is something of a supernatural case. However, that would be sufficient to seriously damage bridges, impair commutes, flatten buildings, disrupt power, break gas & sewage mains, and--unfortunately--result in casualties. Compare to the quake of 1989 in California--if you'd like, you can google pages on it and the damage done; it'd be similar to that in terms of damage.



Given an hour's ride away by MagLev--yeah, they'd have been on the fringes of the quake. There may have been some disruption of services, stuff falling off of shelves, that sort of thing (compare the quake of '89--I live in the southern Bay Area; our power was disrupted for a few days and fragile things fell off the shelves and broke, whereas buildings were flattened in San Francisco and parts of the Bay Bridge fell in). Although, as an aside--California locals who are bred and born in the state tend to be a lot more sensitive to earthquakes. Even relatively heavy sleepers like myself can be shaken out of sleep by 4.0 earthquakes occuring a long ways away--it's just a consequence of living in an area where there are several hundred microquakes on a pretty regular basis. wink My older sister has been known to be able to tell the close-to-exact magnitude of a small trembler while sitting on flat ground during the quake. Just a thing to take into account.

And, indeed--the flattening of urban areas would lead to a moderate increase in suburbs, along with urban renewal--you'd see changes to the essential quality of several areas as older buildings are replaced by newer architectural styles (which are also usually a lot more quake-stable). The increase in public transport, too, has contributed to this--it's easier for people to commute in to major urban areas instead of having to contribute to urban congestion, though in some places (NYC, Dallas-Fort Worth, etc.) the urban congestion has spread out to make more city instead of being really relieved.



Well. Even presuming a California where we've tamed most of the major faults (San Andreas and Rose Canyon come to immediate mind), it's still California. wink Quite a bit of the city would have been blacked out, and buildings not quite up to earthquake standard would have been flattened. Congestion of traffic would be minimized, first due to the fact the quake happened very early in the morning on a Sunday--so not a lot of people were commuting anywhere at the time-of, and not a lot of people attempted to go out during the hours after when urban traffic control was down. This, of course, made it easier for first-response vehicles to get out to damaged areas, which in turn eased a lot of clean-up and rescue efforts.

"Standstill" times varied from business to business--the hardest-hit were those whose employees commuted from out of the area and so couldn't get in for several weeks following the quake except via slower means such as buses. The Institute is a very special case--it followed a somewhat experimental business model, being a cross of a corporate institution and a college campus. Many of the scientists lived on-site, and so were able to help the entire Institute rapidly recover--and get Rosewood back up on its feet.

I'll get the rest of this sometime tomorrow...