I have just finished rewatching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, for the umpteenth time, but this time I was mapping out where things were toward the end, when enormous ships are falling out of the sky into the Potomac River at a place where it is not really wide enough for one of those ships.

They never think about the side effects in disaster movies, do they? For this, they tripled the width of the Potomac at a place where it is a few hundred feet wide, that's all. All that hot metal hitting the water would really annoy the rockfish and the Maryland terrapins. The rockfish might forget but the terrapins will remember.

Let's think of the volume of river water displaced by those enormous ships hitting the river. Where they have them hitting, the waves will wash up over the patios and parking lots into the Watergate, into the Kennedy Center (or what's left of it these days), and into Lower Georgetown's underground parking garages, where it will float a lot of cars. We went through something like this before, back in the 90s, when there was so much rain that it washed cars into the river from above-ground parking lots and floated everything in the underground garages. I'm not sure how the insurance adjusters would account for this flood on their paperwork -- "act of superheroes"?

I'm assuming that the resizing of the river also moved Roosevelt Island half a mile or more downstream, so that it would be there when Bucky pulls Steve out onto the shore (in the only place in that area that has a shore with grass at that angle compared to the water). Upstream, the south side of the river is a rock wall with mansions on top of it for several miles heading upstream -- there used to be several Kennedy places up there -- and on the other side there's a narrow area and then the Washington and Old Dominion Canal, which is a recreation area.

I'm also going to ignore the other fallout, when bits of the Shield building and more pieces of airships drop onto the buildings and streets of Rosslyn, VA, one of the most expensive areas of real estate in the country. Or maybe they'd be drifting a little further apart -- how far apart were those three ships,anyway? That would put one of them over the Mall and another over either Arlington Cemetery or Washington National Airport (I refuse to call it Reagan Airport; he didn't deserve one.)

Anyway, I don't think there's a lot of fanfic that deals with the aftereffects of the actions of superheroes. Just a thought or two for anyone who may need a bit of inspiration...