But, as they have been renowned for doing after devastating calamities, subway workers patched it up much more quickly and trains rattled through it yesterday without even hitting the brakes.
Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important implications for how we think about the role of government in our future.
But in their collective sense of loss, the people of Middletown have defied geographic sprawl by coming together to comfort those devastated by the calamity of Sept. 11.
There have been other hurricanes, along with tornadoes, oil spills, fiscal calamities and intense, sometimes devastating foreign policy developments.
In the Bronze Age, when agriculture had become firmly established as a primary source of food, few calamities would have been as devastating to a community as the loss of its seed stores, or the destruction of its crops.
The impact was devastating to the buffalo and the environment, the zoo said, but it was a calamity for Native Americans, who depended on the buffalo for food, clothing, shelter and spiritual sustenance.
Such calamities as droughts and floods can cause huge numbers of fatalities and devastating economic losses.
First of all, we now know that on August 29, 2005, the region suffered not one but two distinct calamities: a natural disaster that devastated the region and a manmade catastrophe that destroyed much of New Orleans.
Devastating earthquakes will strike, he said, unearthing corpses of previously dead sinners to be "desecrated and shamed," followed by a series of calamities until Oct. 21, when the planet will be obliterated.
