Ed Ranks SimCity 2000 Disasters

Behold, a UFO that's 100% not in the game.

Remember SimCity 2000? That game was fun! It's how you learned valuable lessons about urban planning, providing serves, taxing, etc.  Haha, just kidding. Not really. It's how we learned about how fun of the wanton destruction of  is (before Roland Emmerich films were a thing). Unless you were a coward who turned the "No Disasters" option on.

10. Air Crash

• Description: At random, airplanes flying around the city might crash into one another. Or if you build an airport next to tall buildings. When these occur, a ball of flames is set on the ground beneath the incident area. Even with disasters turned off, these sometimes still happen - but set no fire.
• Severity:  I mean, pretty damn depressing for all the family members of the passengers. But the fireball made on the ground is usually pretty small.
• How to Counter it: Dispatching fire fighters.
• Coolness:  I fly on airplanes way too much for this to be at all cool.  This sucks. Plus, within game there are about 5 different disasters that lead to fires. Of them all, this is pretty weak.  You can also crash your helicopter by targeting it with your cursor and hitting it.  I'm not saying I never did it myself, but it's a pretty sick thing to do.

 9. Fire

• Description: A fire starts somewhere in your city, and begins to spread pretty rapidly, destroying all buildings and infrastructure in its path.
• Severity:  These can spread pretty quickly, but are concentrated to one area so not all that hard to fight. 
• How to Counter it: Again, by dispatching fire fighters.
• Coolness:  The fire is bigger than with an air crash and spreads fast, so that's neat.  But, as stated above, there are several different disasters that set fire to your city, with the basic "fire" option being fairly blah. I think there is also a scenario in the game called "Volcano" where you have to counter a volcano, but I'm pretty sure it's just a big fire so I'll lump it under this one. And the same goes for the "Microwave" disaster which is just a fire near a Microwave Power Plant.

What a hurricane looks like. e.g. totally not in the game either.

8. Hurricane

• Description: A large portion of your city is filled with water, leaving it in total ruins.
• Severity:  This can often take up a pretty large chunk of your city, especially any parts of your city near rivers and the coast.
• How to Counter it: You can't really do anything. My vague recollection is that maybe if you dispatch forces (police, military and fire) that the specific blocks of land that those forces are stationed on can't be destroyed - but everything else around it will be. I'm not 100% sure on that though, and I'm not dedicated enough to go find an old game simulator to test it. 
• Coolness: Since the hurricane in this game acts as a really big flood, it should be cooler than a flood. But it's not. The hurricane is a big miss. Why? Because of what I just said. This is just a big flood. The game doesn't add any mega-sized tornado or anything that looks like wind damage. I guess that the graphics in 1993 simply weren't good enough to properly represent what a hurricane should look like.

7. Tornado

• Description: A twister rips through your city, destroying buildings and leaving rubble in a perfectly straight line. 
• Severity:  These tornadoes were pretty small, all things considered. And they never caused fires to start. They just turned buildings to rubble, then you had to clean the rubble.
• How to Counter it: I think these ones were un-counter-able. They just ran their course. 
• Coolness: Not very. Sometimes a Tornado would appear near a corner of a map, and would last about 10 seconds before it was done and went off the map.  And the lack of creating greater damage other than turning buildings to rubble wasn't that impressive.  Also, this game's AI wasn't powerful enough to make sure that tornadoes only effected white trash that live in trailer homes. Big fail there!

6. Flood

• Description: Water destroys part of your city, leaving rubble.
• Severity:  Mild. The areas effected by flood were generally small and it wouldn't take that long to rebuild.
• How to Counter it: Same as hurricanes above. I think if you placed a dispatch to a specific block of land it was protected, but beyond that water could fill all the blocks around it. 
• Coolness: An accurate representation of a flood, I suppose. Not that epic or amazing, but an okay, small-scale disaster. 

5. Toxic Spill (Chemical Cloud)

• Description:  Generally in an industrial area of your city or around power plants, a grey "toxic" cloud will appear and force any buildings around it to be abandoned.
• Severity:  Mild. The areas they effect aren't that big and after they go away the abandoned places are able to go back in business.
• How to Counter it: Uh. I actually don't remember. You'd think firefighters would be the best to respond to this, but you might be able to use police or military as well. At any rate, responding to the spill itself isn't that difficult. The main way to counter it is to prevent it from happening in the first place by managing the industrial areas of your city better.
• Coolness: This is cool because it teaches kids an important environmental lesson. Yeah, your city will need industrial zoned areas. But if you bunch them up and make them too big, or keep your old fossil fuel power plants around for too long - you'll wind up with these.

4. Earthquake

• Description:The screen shakes violently and random patches of land in your city explode, causing fire all over the place.
• Severity:  Pretty big, as the entirety of your city is subject to little fires that can grow larger all over the place. The disaster doesn't "end" until all of them are put out.
• How to Counter it: Firefighters, but there will be so many fires that you won't have enough. You'll probably have to pause the game for a second and look at where all the fires are, and then prioritize which ones are nearer to key and expensive things you don't want destroyed (e.g. power plants, Arcologies).
• Coolness: Awesome. Fires everywhere! These are difficult to counter, and the screen violently shaking is a good addition that really sells it.  The fact that it causes so much damage all over the place and you have to prioritize your response is also sweet.

Pictured: the superpowers of Jubilee.

3. Rioters

• Description: Riots break out in parts of your city, either because of poor police coverage, or because your approval rating is super-duper low from things like having high taxes, no services or entertainment, etc.
• Severity:  Medium-level, sometimes they could get pretty big and destroy some stuff.  Unlike tornadoes, they actually cause fire too.
• How to Counter it: Deploying police and military (yikes! Is this a banana republic?) could stop a particular riot, but not get at the root causes of the riots.  You'll also need to deploy fire fighters for the fires the rioters start.
• Coolness: Pretty cool.  I love how crime and approval ratings worked in this game. I think riots could randomly break out even if you were a fairly good mayor, but they were mostly avoidable if you had any talent at all at playing the game.  Honestly folks - how hard is it to build police stations, parks, reduce traffic, etc?  The whole "making your people happy" was a fun part of the game, and this "disaster" was probably the most interactive one because it was based on something you actually control, rather than just randomness. Its introduction to the 1993 game is probably inspired by the 1992 LA Riots.

2. Nuclear Meltdown

• Description: If you have a nuclear power plant that is either over its 50-year lifespan or that you're working too hard by having a too big city without enough power - you're going to have a meltdown where the power plant is destroyed, fires are set in the nearby vicinity, and certain titles are irradiated.
• Severity:  Pretty bad. The irradiated titles are a complete loss for you, and you can't construct anything there again. I believe I've read that some people leave the game running at cheetah speed for hundreds of thousands of years and that they eventually go away - but for all intents and purposes, this is a permanent loss.
• How to Counter it: For the fires - you can dispatch fire fighters. For the ruined buildings, you bulldoze the damage. But for the irradiated titles - you can do NOTHING. Sorry.
• Coolness: Again, awesome. Do not mess with nuclear power, people. This will ruin you. Don't be a cheap-ass if your power station has exceeded its lifespan. Replace it!

1. Monster

• Description: A large, floating, black, robotic, cyclops monster with crab arms from space will float onto your city and attack it, generally with fire.  But then again sometimes it would attack your city by planting trees, water, or wind power plants. So I guess sometimes they are less "evil monsters from space," and more environmentally-friendly aliens who want to show you the right path.
• Severity:  Honestly not that bad, and the damage they do can be quite limited. Although if they just happen to land on a super important and expensive part of your city and destroy that (or turn it into trees) - then you could be screwed a bit.
• How to Counter it: You can chase it away with military and police, and also put out any fires it starts with fire fighters. 
• Coolness: This was so cool that the alien robot monster thing was on some versions of the box art for the game (other versions of the box art had a UFO on the cover that looked nothing like the Monster and didn't actually appear in the game, which is... weird). The fact that you needed all three times of response units to respond to it (like riots) is also nice. Last but not least - knowing that it is occasionally a benevolent, tree-planting monster is also super awesome.