Talk:Aftershock: Earthquake in New York/Plot rewrite

The film follows the events of an earthquake in New York City through the eyes of several sets of people: Dori Thorell (Sharon Lawrence) and her 9-year-old son, Danny (Michal Suchanek), and Dori's husband and father Sam Thorell (Garwin Sandford); Ballerina Diane Agostini (Jennifer Garner) and her father Frank (Mitchell Ryan); Evie Lincoln (Lisa Nicole Carson) a public defender and her client Joshua Bingham (JR Bourne), her grandmother Emily Lincoln (Cicily Tyson) and her father the mayor Bruce Lincoln (Charles S. Dutton); Fire Chief Thomas Ahearn and his daughter Christine, and firefighter Bruce Summerlin (Mark Rolston); Nikolai Karvoski (Fred Weller), an immigrant taxcab driver; and reporter Jillian Parnell (Erika Eleniak-Goglin).

Through the failing relationship of Dori and Sam, parental concerns about the vulnerability of children are explored. Danny has been injured in an accident two years previously, and at first Sam writes off Dori's concerns about earthquakes as imaginary, since they had moved from the quake-prone Los Angeles area to New York.

A major part of the film, and the cliffhanger during the airing of the movie as a two-part miniseries, is Danny's survival of the quake that wrecks his school but leaves him suspended in mid air in a bathroom on a high floor. He is rescued by Dori, who is an experienced rock climber and climbs up the wrecked building.

Diane loses her father in the quake, and is comforted and helped by Nikolai, and they become close. In the epilog, they are still together and Diane is a star ballerina.

Evie and Joshua are among people trapped in the Subway when the quake hits. Joshua takes charge, and in a subplot it is revealed that Joshua committed the murder of his wife, a crime of which Evie had had him cleared. He tries to kill Evie and the others, but dies in a fortuitous accident as he tries to escape.

Ahearn, at first seen on the point of resignation because of his differences with the mayor, takes charge of the emergency, and in the epilog he is shown still in his post one year later.

The earthquake sequence shows many notable Manhattan landmarks being destroyed such as The Statue of Liberty falling into New York Harbor and the Guggenheim Museum collapsing in on itself. Also directly after the earthquake, footage from a helicopter above the city show that The Brooklyn Bridge is destroyed along with other bridges leading out of Manhattan. The earthquake leaves most of the city's skyscrapers still standing. New York City Fire Chief Thomas Ahearn (Tom Skerritt) teams up with mayor, Bruce Lincoln (Charles S. Dutton), to save the destroyed city from destruction. They must race to enact a city-wide emergency plan and rebuild the city. In an epilog set one year later, the city is shown under re-construction.