Chitauri Invasion of New York City

I wrote this shortly after The Avengers was released, but apparently never published it... interesting numbers. 

Using computer models created by KAC R&D for estimating nuclear weapons effects, as well as techniques developed for use in predicting damage in Japan from attacks by ゴジラ(Godzilla), モスラ (Mothra), and particularly メカゴジラ (Mechagodzilla), the damages and losses resulting from this weekend’s invasion by the Chitauri have been estimated.

KAC expects the physical damage from the invasion to be $60 to $70 Billion Dollars, with secondary economic impacts from cleanup, loss of business, disruptions to commerce and services, etc. causing an additional $90 Billion dollars. Casualties are undoubtedly in the high thousands. Therefore, we estimate the total economic impact to be at least $160 Billion dollars. This compares with the direct impact from the September 11th 2001 attacks of $30 Billion dollars (total impact $83 Billion). For additional context, comparable disasters include the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami ($122 Billion), the 1995 Kobe Earthquake ($140 Billion), and Hurricane Katrina at over $90 Billion. 

Post Event Damage Estimate (via Hollywood Reporter)

One hundred sixty billion dollars is an absurd amount of money. For scale keep in mind that the worldwide gross for The Avengers covers less than 1% of that, but Apple has roughly that much in cash. However, I'm surprised it isn't more. In fact, these numbers seem hard to reconcile. 

For some quick (and clearly totally accurate) calculations I turned to wikipedia where I found these not entirely comparable numbers that I will procede to compare: 

• Katrina: "Federal disaster declarations covered 90,000 square miles (233,000 km2) of the United States, an area almost as large as the United Kingdom."
• September 11th: "Some 31,900,000 square feet (2,960,000 m2) of Lower Manhattan office space was damaged or destroyed."

Putting those areas into the same units we have 233,000 vs. 2.96. In other words, Using the KAC estimates, Katrina's cost would come out to $386,266 per km2 while September 11th would come out to $28,040,540,541 per km2. Something like 70,000 times more expensive per square kilometer.

Granted, my numbers for September 11th are probably way off. The number I used references office space, and I'm sure that not all of the area affected would have been included in an office space number. On the other hand, I suspect office space calculations also reflect offices in multi story buildings, and clearly some very tall buildings were affected. Maybe those innacuaracies somehow ofset each other, maybe not. But even if my numbers for September 11th are half of what they should be, or a tenth, or a hundreth, I'm not sure how the relative costs make sense.

Let's assume that my estimate for September 11th should be 100 times larger, even though I don't think I'm that far off. That would bring the areas to 233,000 vs. 2,960 and the costs to $386,266 per km2 vs. $28,040,540 per km2. That is still more than 72 times more expensive per square kilomter.

If this cost difference, or an even larger cost difference, is real it seems like it must be attributable to the type of area affected by the damage (New York City vs. New Orleans), and perhaps by the type of damage (building collapse vs. flooding). Seems like quite a mismatch.

Setting that question aside, the movie invasion was located in New York, and much of the damage was caused by stuff crashing into buildings, it seems like invasion damage should parallel the cost per square kilimeter of September 11th more closely than those from Katrina.

Google tells me that New York City has an area of about 1200 square kilometers, but at the rate above The Avengers would have only needed to destroy 5.7 square kilometers to reach the $160 billion range. Less that 0.5% of the city.