The Hudson River tunnels will undoubtedly fail, but it isn't likely to be a disaster-film spectacle.
They are currently dying from something more insidious, like gum disease - gradual, irreversible, yet no less fatal than a catastrophic incident - or something that will creep its way across the tableau like a blob that has come to asphyxiate the Northeast Corridor.
This is irrefutable: The 108-year-old train tunnels, decaying from the inside, need to be repaired and replaced, because once they fail, the consequences will reverberate throughout the land like an economic earthquake.
The damage would be felt beyond the 200,000 riders who use those train tunnels daily. Busses and ferries would be intolerable. The roads and bridges would be worse. Housing values would drop and the employment market would get crushed, with jobs going to those who actually get into Manhattan on time. Everybody's stress level would red-line.
And the NEC Commission estimates that the economy would lose $100 million per day or $36.5 billion per year - instant recession, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) predicts.
This shouldn't be hard for President Trump to grasp, but he took another swing of his meat axe to the Gateway Project, and whether it was triggered by a petulant brain spasm or political subterfuge is still unclear.
Either way, he is playing with dynamite: Trump reportedly told House Speaker Paul Ryan last week that he doesn't want any funding for the $30 billion project in the upcoming spending bill, and whether Ryan and Appropriations chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-11th Dist.) comply is an open question.
The emerging consensus is that Trump is trying to punish Schumer for blocking nominees, and if that means holding up the most important infrastructure project in the country, that's what deal makers do.
The tubes undergo regular maintenance, but both need to be taken down for one year in order to be fully updated from its World War I standards. That would reduce rail capacity in and out of Penn Station from 24 trains per hour to six. Everyone's going to feel it: The tunnels are at the vortex of the NEC, a region with 52 million people that generates one-fifth of the U.S. domestic product.
Ideally, this work should be done while the new tunnels are already in operation, but that is less likely thanks to the ongoing pie fight over funding, even though both New York and New Jersey had a deal with the Obama Administration to cover half the cost while the feds paid for the other half.
But Trump kiboshed that deal, and now he's trying to strangle any subsequent funding.
Think about that: While China is expanding its global reach through a historic project called Belt and Road - which will stitch together 65 percent of the world's population with a web of railroads from Rotterdam to Jakarta - America's infrastructure is under attack from its own president.
Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, put it this way:
"Now we're reading that Gateway isn't sexy enough for (Trump), because it's a tunnel," he said. "But this is a federal asset, owned by Amtrak. It's already his tunnel. And when it falls, he's going to own that one, too."
The president has launched his dis-ownership campaign, lining up Tea Partiers like Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) to grouse about how "North Carolina should not have to foot the bill for this hall of fame earmark."
Under a system of government he seems to endorse, North Carolina and the South would not have been rebuilt after the Civil War. The TVA never would have been built. Rural electrification would have been delayed for years. Memo to Budd: We'd like our money back, please, with interest. We have a tunnel to build.