The earthquake that will destroy Toronto - Part 6

And now we get to the good stuff.  In summary, people right on the rupture have been taken care of (**). The nature of earthquake goes far beyond that.  All the lifelines of the Golden Horseshoe have been destroyed.  Every transformer in the system has blown.  The natural gas pipes have broken, and fires have broken out everywhere.  The roads and bridges all have hunks torn out of them.  The airport is dead.  There is no electricity and no natural gas, and it's 20 below.

Jack and Sara live north of the magic line.  Their home wasn't badly damaged, but there is no power and no gas.  All the normal emergency shelters like school gyms and community centres were constructed of block wall and have been red-tagged.  They settle under their blankets for a long wait.  But they see fires in the distance, and they are in one of those subdivisions where large houses fill the entire lot.  Their friends, Bob and Sue, are in townhouses with a common wooden roof.  There was a reason why they separated houses in the old days.  **

Most tall buildings of Toronto are on the hanging wall of the fault.  The rupture terminated just short of downtown, but the pulse kept going.  In fact, the termination of the rupture caused its own problems.  Instead of just a positive motion, the pulse now has a whip-back.  All those buildings were designed with a sinusoidal motion on a shake table.  The engineers divided the building into 'modes' and made sure there was enough strength to shake and shimmy through any California basin earthquake.

But the pulse was a strong positive with a sudden reverse pull.  This caused 'fling' in the towers, something mentioned many years ago in papers, but always ignored.  When asked, the engineers had always stated that 'Tradition was the most important thing.'  Unfortunately, this fling was like snapping a bull-whip, and the top floors had sharp things flying about.  No help was expected for Judy, who had cut an artery.  **

Meanwhile, every perfectly good building was evacuating its people.  There was no power, and all the fire alarms were singing.  The subways were dead, and people jammed the streets, bringing traffic to a halt.  John was freezing without a coat, and he looked up at the Trump Tower.  Was that glass falling?  **

-- blah, blah -- on to the nuclear stations!