As any of my friends will tell you, I'm an action movie buff. Good or bad, new or classic, I go to see them or watch them on DVD pretty regularly. However, the one genre of action films I'm generally not too excited about is disaster films. It's not that I don't like them, I just have a bad habit of commenting and laughing at factual errors. It's very unnerving to my friends when I burst out laughing at an otherwise dramatic moment.
However, even in a non-disaster movie, I still look at some scenes of destruction and ask myself how I would have handled such an event. Actually, it's usually more something like, "Crap! I'm glad I'm not that city's emergency manager!" I've even given some thought to using movie clips or plot ideas as the basis for exercises.
Now the good folks at the Kintec Analysis Corporation have gone one better. To showcase their talents in impact analysis, they've developed a post event damage estimate for the climatic battle in the Avengers movie. (If you haven't seen it, do so!) In this battle, the Avengers take on an alien invasion force out to conquer earth (what else?) and the result is chaos on the streets of New York. Kinetic estimates the damage from the battle at $160 billion dollars.
What makes this so impressive (and worth blogging about) is that the analysts at Kinetic take this fictional scenario and do a great job of identifying real issues that would have arisen if it had been real. They describe a methodology for assessing the damage and apply it to the damage seen in the film. They consider insurance questions (does the participation of the nordic gods Thor and Loki give insurance companies an out under Act-of-God clauses?) and issues of liability (what is the liability of the government agency that created the portal that allowed the invasion force to enter?). They even discuss the risk of hazardous materials exposure related to cleaning up alien equipment and bodies.
So see the movie, read the damage estimate, and consider how you could use this idea to make your exercises more interesting.
Thanks to Art Taber for sending me the link to the damage estimate!
Comments