Unlikely Seeds of Disaster in Big Apple

As much as Angelenos might secretly (or not so secretly) relish the thought of New York City getting hit by an earthquake every once in a while, the scientific truth is: It ain’t very likely.

But that’s far from the only unbelievable aspect of the CBS two-part miniseries “Aftershock: Earthquake in New York,” which depicts the Big One striking the Big Apple (Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m.). The primary mystery is how former fire chief Thomas Ahearn, played by the mumbling, soporific Tom Skerritt, could ever be expected to douse a burning match, let alone lead New York out of the ruins of a mammoth, mythical quake.

“Aftershock” actually starts promisingly, with the lives of several characters jostled ominously by subtle but unmistakable (at least to Californians) foreshocks to the Big One. And it ends strongly, with several tense, believable rescues from the wreckage.

After a quake sequence that rates about a 4.5 on the reality scale, the movie descends rapidly into a series of predictable vignettes that we’ve seen numerous times before--notably 25 years ago in the groundbreaking movie “Earthquake.” Only in this case, Charlton Heston, Victoria Principal and George Kennedy have been replaced (and not necessarily for the better) by Skerritt, Lisa Nicole Carson and Charles S. Dutton.

Speaking of reality, a 7.0 temblor such as the one that wreaks havoc in “Aftershock” should happen there once every 10,000 years, or about the amount of time it would take to get Skerritt to mutter a convincing line.

“We cannot exclude a magnitude 7” in New York, says seismologist Klaus Jacob, senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “But it’s very low on the radar screen.” Jacob was not involved in the production of the miniseries but did provide some technical information to CBS. More likely, he says, is a magnitude 5 (every 100 years) or magnitude 6 (every 1,000 years). “We have a very moderate seismic hazard,” he added.

Not that co-producer and script writer Paul Eric Myers’ adaptation of Chuck Scarborough’s novel (Scarborough was a newscaster for NBC) pays any attention to such bothersome figures.

“Aftershock” dispenses with any geophysical rhyme or reason for a 7.0 quake hitting New York City. There is not much technically wrong with “Aftershock” because there isn’t much technical in it. Not a single mention is made by any of the characters as to what may have triggered the first such massive quake there in memory.

The destruction and crumbling of buildings is probably done about as well as it can be on TV, but many corresponding sequences in its 1974 predecessor seemed more convincing.

There is no doubt that a large temblor would bring down a lot of buildings in New York because of “the omnipresence of unreinforced masonry,” Jacob says. “That’s our biggest concern. [Such buildings] have been weeded out in Southern California, but not in New York.”

The largest losses, in dollars and lives, would come in shorter buildings, he says--”unreinforced brownstones . . . 10-story apartment buildings.” The taller buildings, above 25-30 stories, have been built to withstand the lateral forces of winds of 100 mph. “This isn’t exactly the same as seismic forces,” Jacob says, “but it helps.”

For this reason, he says, “the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center are the places to be during an earthquake . . . as long as it’s not a [magnitude] 7.”

Enter Hollywood. Take the most unlikely scenario and run with it, even if it won’t happen for another 10,000 years. Still the death and destruction a 7.0 temblor would exact on New York would cost the city from $50 billion to more than $100 billion and injure as many as 100,000 people, according to Jacob.

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Exactly what type of fault would trigger such a cataclysmic event? “It’s not appropriate to talk about a fault system in New York,” Jacob says.

New York does not seem to have “the famous blind thrust faults of Los Angeles, which have been the talk of the town for the last five years,” he says. New York has “zillions of faults on the surface, but they are all 60 million years old” and largely inactive, he says.

But, he adds, “we know there are faults at depths because we know there are earthquakes,” albeit mild ones.

An eclectic cast does its best with some hackneyed material. J.R. Bourne, as public defender Carson’s psycho client Joshua, is the best of the lot. Trapped with his lawyer in a subway tunnel after the quake, Bourne transforms from a mild-mannered defendant into a looneytoon that would do Ray Liotta proud. Also relatively convincing is Sharon Lawrence as a neurotic mother who has just moved from, of all places, Los Angeles. Lawrence’s overcoming of her fears to scale a building (she’s a former mountain climber) to attempt to rescue her trapped son is probably the highlight of the movie.

The miniseries is “a mixed blessing,” Jacob says. “From an education standpoint, it’s a window of opportunity to bring up the subject.” New York City didn’t adopt an earthquake building code until 1996, he says, “and there is no clear-cut and serious emergency plan.”

But then, as Jacob’s adds: “A magnitude 7 quake probably doesn’t have much to do with a likely reality . . . nor [does] the content of the movie.”