If nothing else, this visually impressive hour and change of first-rate disaster porn (first rate because it contains no lame attempt at developing a “plot” or in any way creating a drama out of its scenario) should be an object lesson to us all about the importance of maintenance. Whether it’s painting a bridge or clearing quagga mussels out of the intake pipes of a dam, if it gets neglected for long enough, catastrophic failure is inevitable.

It has been observed that the big difference between the First and Third Worlds is maintenance; most of the imagined cityscapes in the ten- to twenty-years post period bore a striking resemblance to, say, Gorazde or Beruit or Mogadishu (did you know Mogadishu was once considered a beautiful city, a treasure of the African continent? A really long time ago) or Kabul.

Especially interesting was the look at the city in the Ukraine abandoned wholesale after the Chernobyl disaster, a city that has been devoid of humans for a little over 20 years and is being reclaimed by the plants and critters a la Angkor Wat.