[quote=unimogbert]
What can you do???? Seems obvious to me- DON'T BE THERE! Working in NYC (or any other large city for that matter) is, in my opinion, a choice against one's own survival for many reasons.
[/quote=unimogbert]

BullS*^^. Utter, total Bull%&*%^.

I live in a rural part of PA, and work in Manhattan. I'm a Lieutenant officer in the local Fire Company, and I've been in NYC during a recent emergency - when the big steam line exploded over my Grand Central terminal.

The response was instant - I mean it - instant. There was no dispatch delay, there was no waiting on responding workers.

The number and quality of emergency services in NYC surpasses ANYTHING you can imagine. The speed, competence and totality of the response, the preplaning, the sheer experience of the Urban emergency services leaves us rural folks so far behind it's not even comparable.

I've also seen the NYC response to big emergencies, starting with 9/11.

When FEMA called NYC to help on 9/11 - NYC said, "No, we can handle it". And they did.

When the lights went out for a few days in 2003, it was a bit of a party, No rioting, no looting.

I've seen stuff happening in NYC that would utterly cripple my local response capabilities - in every respect - and these events didn't even warrant any news coverage.

Before you automatically assume that cities are seething swamps ready to explode into violence at a moment's notice, I suggest that you consider that, with the exception of a few short-term localized events (Katrina, Watts, Washington Heights), our cities have always endured a crisis, and Americans have long banded together in a crisis.

Let's look to the California Wildfires as an example of how most people react in a "we're all in this together" situation.