Gotham City is almost always portrayed as a city on the Eastern Coast of the United States.  Most of the depictions of the city confirm this, whether it be the architecture or the weather (in that they do get a cold winter).  I was reading into an obscure character yesterday (the Silver Monkey) and a story arc which he was featured in (Brotherhood of the Fist) and one of the plot elements involved Batman and Green Arrow (who was Connor Hawke at the time) infiltrating a Kobra stronghold outside of Gotham City.  After escaping death they had to face off against the members of the Monkey Clan who intended to kill them.  Eventually though the clan retreats, after an avalanche bears down on them, assuming that the force of nature will finish them off where they could not.  My initial reaction was a bit of disbelief, that there would be an avalanche so close to Gotham, after are there are really not as many high mountain ranges on the US East Coast.  This issue came only a few months after the events of the Cataclysm story arc where Gotham was hit by an earthquake.  Granted there are fault lines which run through the East Coast of the USA (there have been a few large earthquakes in fact recently from Virginia to Ontario) but the occurance of a quake which would literally shake buildings to the ground does seem far fetched.  On closer inspection though, the avalanche story does not seem as far fethced, for instance the Adirondacks which are in northern New York do routinely have avalanche warnings, and are in fact dangerous as people think of avalanches only in larger mountain ranges so the warnings often go unheeded.  So while avalanches might not seem as unlikely and with a large seismic event more unlikely, it seems as though there is almost a group of natural disasters which seem more dramatic than others.  The natural disasters which the East Coast might expect (massive blizzards or hurricanes) are not often given much thought, although they would be of much greater concern to the citizens and the city's protectors than the perils displayed on the Discovery Channel.