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Member, Beacon International Group, Ltd.
It might just be summer entertainment but, according to one disaster expert, if Superman weren’t merely a fictitious superhero and the battles he wages with villain General Zod in the latest Superman film were real, the catastrophic damages to Metropolis would reach blockbuster proportions.
According to website BuzzFeed, models of the mayhem depicted in “Man of Steel” created by Charles Watson and Watson Technical Consulting show Superman and Zod’s little dustup resulting in 129,000 dead, more than 250,000 missing (most of those also dead) and almost 1 million injured.
Physical damages to Metropolis would reach $700 billion, with total losses including economic impact of more than $2 trillion.
In a blog post, Mr. Watson said modeling the destruction to Metropolis involved two simulations, one centered at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue in New York (Metropolis’ real-life counterpart) and the other at Canal and Madison streets in Chicago. Damages were based on the blast effects (but not thermal or radiation effects) of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb.
Why Superman didn’t choose to battle General Zod in a less developed area than downtown Metropolis might be a topic for discussion, but that’s entertainment.