Tunguska airburst occurs over New England in 1908

Gan

Banned
On June 30, 1908 a small rock from space entered our atmosphere and exploded in the air over the Tunguska area in Russia with a blast around 15 megatons.

Instead of exploding over the remote Siberia, it's over a random spot in New England. What would be the consequences of this? How about the casualties? Would it do enough damage, even without hitting a major city, to have long-term effects on the area, and perhaps the world?
 
At the turn of the century, I think New England was still something of an industrial powerhouse when it came to textile mills. The devastation wrought to the area should definitely be enough to dissuade the large scale OTL immigration of penniless French-Canadians to New England in their search for work during the economic downturn across the border.
 
Because of the way its trajectory was, if Tunguska was aimed at New England it would have missed the earth as a whole.
 
It might take years for America to recover from the disaster and prevent the US from entering WW1.
Depends where it hits

90% of New England is still fairly rural, unless it hits Eastern Mass, Rhode Island or Connecticut, it won't hurt that much, if it hits Northern Maine then it might not kill more than a few hundred people, whereas it could take out two thirds of Rhode Island
 
I tried to find info on the blast radius.

Found this,
Trees were incinerated in a 9-mile (14.4 km) radius from ground zero and were knocked over in a 25 mile (40 km) radius following the Tunguska explosion in 1908. If this had occurred over a heavily populated area, the effect would have been catastrophic for the people living there.
From http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2000/ast25jan_1/


So I went to http://www.carloslabs.com/node/16 and plugged in Boston for a roughly equivalent atomic bomb, see below for very rough estimate,

Tunguska ish blast radius estimate.JPG
 
Depends where it hits

90% of New England is still fairly rural, unless it hits Eastern Mass, Rhode Island or Connecticut, it won't hurt that much, if it hits Northern Maine then it might not kill more than a few hundred people, whereas it could take out two thirds of Rhode Island

And this too.

My first estimate was somewhere in New Hampshire, and I couldn't relate to the open space as receiving comprehensible destruction. So I plugged in Boston to get a sense of something I was at least somewhat familiar with.
 

Gan

Banned
Because of the way its trajectory was, if Tunguska was aimed at New England it would have missed the earth as a whole.


Let's assume that the object has the trajectories, and arrival time, adjusted to allow it to have the same kind of impact over New England.

And although New England was more rural, it will still hit a higher-populated area than where it originally hit.
 
Because of the way its trajectory was, if Tunguska was aimed at New England it would have missed the earth as a whole.

Yeah, I think messing around with orbital mechanics falls into the ASB catagory.

And... you forgot one of the key rules of this website: never let facts get in the way of a good (or bad) story.
 
Yeah, I think messing around with orbital mechanics falls into the ASB catagory.

And... you forgot one of the key rules of this website: never let facts get in the way of a good (or bad) story.

What if the asteroid smashes into another while in the outer solar system and they merge orbits, tweaking the trajectory enough to drop an even bigger blast right on New Bedford.
 
Well the population distribution of New England is very uneven, with eighty percent of the population living in the the southern states so I'll do a couple of scenarios.

A. Maine
-If it hits anywhere in Maine other than in the immediate vicinity of Portland or bangor then casualties are likely to be very low with at most 10,000 dead, but the lumber industry would be very hard hit and would take many years to recover. If one of the cities I mentioned is hit then the casualties would be in the tens of thousands for either location and if Portland is hit then the busiest port in Northern New England and main winter port for Montreal has been utterly obliterated, and if bangor is hit then the lumber industry I'd even more fucked because bangor was the epicenter for lumber transportation and manufacturing in Maine.

B. New Hampshire/Vermont
-NH and VT, like Maine, are largly rural states with few urban centers. Both states are less valuable for industry because of their legally mountains terrain. The best case scenario for New England would be for the event to happen in northern NH because it is almost completely devoid of people, industry, and major transportation corridors with casualties less than one thousand. Other areas in the rural parts would also be fairly minor in terms of economic loss and casualties, its when you get to the population centers of Portsmouth, Manchester, Concord, and Burlington that really bad things happen. If it hits Portsmouth the other port in northern NE gets wiped out and so does the Portsmouth shipyards which were the place where many naval ships were built at the time and would represent a huge loss for the USN. Manchester is the primary point of access via rail and road into NH and VT from the south as well as the states largest city and industrial center so casualties would be in the tens of thousands accompanied by a huge economic loss fur the state. The other cities are smaller and less important but would still generate larger numbers of casualties.

C. Connecticut/western MA
There are many medium sized cities in CT including Hartford, bridgeport, new haven, springfield, Stamford, waterbury, Danbury, and new London. All of these cities are major manufacturing centers, New Haven, springfield, and Hartford are road and rail hubs, and New London is home to the main submarine base and submarine academy which the navy would also miss and springfield had the armory. Any of these cities being hit would be disastrous for New England and very bad for the whole USA. If it hit in the rural areas of northwest Connecticut our the Berkshires in Massachusetts the losses would be better but more than rural NH/VT/Maine. If Pittsfield is hit then GE is gone and so is a substantial manufacturing base, if Amherst or Northampton get hit then there are going to be pretty bad losses and many colleges such as UMASS will be gone.

D. Eastern MA, Rhode island
Worcester, Lowell, Lawrence, New Bedford, Fall River, Providence would all cause disasters for the region if hit because of their importance to government, as Ports, manufacturing, and large populations. New Bedford has the largest fishing fleet in the whole world at the time and Providence is the capital of Rhode island and a city of over 200,000 people. The rest of this area is either suburban or the home of the rich and famous and would have fair losses and damaged moral from celebrity deaths.

E, Boston
We all know that if this happened to Boston that New England would lose all relevance in world affairs, plunge the region into a depression like state, and major economic troubles for the rest of the country because of the cities position as the regions largest city, largest port, largest transportation hub, the capital of Massachusetts, the historical significance, the large number of colleges in the city, the cultural capital of new England. At the time Boston and surrounding cities and Towns had roughly one million people so the casualties from thus could quite easily be in 'the hundreds of thousands. This is obviously the worst case scenario for if the tunguska event were to occur in New England while northern NH would be the best case scenario.
 
What if the asteroid smashes into another while in the outer solar system and they merge orbits, tweaking the trajectory enough to drop an even bigger blast right on New Bedford.

According to forum rules, it'd still be catagorized as ASB (or it should be).

I think it'd take more than one alteration to get the target you want. Two rocks colliding will speed one up, slow it down, or move it to the side. In any event, I'd say it'd still miss Earth. Go back far enough and have several small alterations, then perhaps.
 
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