The only thing that's remotely real here is that the second two lines of the first quatrain are taken from what is often cited as a Nostradamus writing identified as Century 6, Quatrain 97:
Cinq et quarante degrez ciel bruslera
Feu approcher de la grand cit� neuve
Instant grand flamme esparse sautera
Quand on voudra des Normans faire preuue.
An approximate English translation would be:
Five and forty steps the sky will burn
Fire approaching the large new city
Instantly a great thin flame will leap
When someone will want to test the Normans.
This one is marvel of the all-purpose prophecy. If you want to ensure that your "prediction" will be correct, just make some vague allusions to fire, because then you're covered for a whole host of circumstances: fire (including those started by natural disasters), war (or any type of killing or attack involving bombs or firearms), crashes of motorized vehicles (cars, trains, boats, airplanes), natural phenomena (such as volcanoes and lightning), and astronomical phenomena (such as comets and novas). Surely all of those things are bound to occur within the next few centuries -- probably more than once -- and your prophecy can be applied to every one of them.
"Five and forty steps"? That's a good one -- it covers the reckoning of angles, degrees of latitude and longitude, temperature, time elapsed on a clock, and a bundle of other measurements. You're bound to find a fit here in any disaster.
"The large new city" -- ooh, it sure takes a lot of insight to "predict" that a fire, war, explosion, crash, or natural disaster will hit a large city sometime in the next several hundred years. I mean, what're the odds of that? If you don't identify the city in any way (except to note that it's "large"), your "prediction" can be applied to hundreds of events in cities all over the world for hundred of years to come!
So, even if this is a real prophecy of Nostradamus', it simply provides more evidence of how much shoehorning has to be performed to get one of these vague "predictions" to fit modern occurrences:
The quatrain cites no date whatsoever, and thus the very same verse has already been widely cited a a "prediction" of many different events over the last several years, such as the discovery and approach of the spectacular Hale-Bopp comet in 1995 and the mysterious crash of TWA Flight 800 in July 1996. (And since Nostradamus' writings were widely cited as predicting the end of the world in the year 2000, we can't figure out why he'd be prophesying anything beyond that date anyhow.) Like the Energizer bunny, this is the prediction that just keeps on predicting, and predicting, and predicting . . .
The quatrain says absolutely nothing about New York City, the United States, or even North America. Ooh, but the "new city" must be a reference to New York, everyone claims. Sure, if you overlook that there's nothing "new" about New York other than its name (it's actually one of the oldest cities in North America), that many other of the world's major cities have the word "new" in their names (such as New Delhi), and that any city settled, built, or rebuilt in the last four hundred years -- in other words, just about any city in the world -- could be considered "new" relative to Nostradamus' time.
The line about a sky that "will burn at five and forty degrees" has to be stretched to the point of ridiculousness to pertain to the events in New York City. The Big Apple is nowhere near 45� latitude (it's below the 41� mark), and several major North American cities (e.g., Boston, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, Montreal) are much closer to 45� latitude than Gotham. Oh, but Nostradamus was so close -- so close, in fact that people have been busily working overtime to invent a few dozen other ways of explaining away the discrepancy: It's the angle at which two airplanes hit the World Trade Center towers. (You have to wonder if the people claiming this actually understand what a 45-degree angle is.) No, wait, it's the resulting fires "burning at 45 degrees." (This is just silly -- fire burns up, so obviously flames shooting out the sides of a building are going to have to travel sideways in order to go upwards). Ooh, I've got it -- at the time of the first crash, the hands of a clock formed a 45� angle. (No doubt somebody would have a found a time zone where this held true if New York's didn't fit.) You can bet that if events had occurred in a city with a colder climate, the Nostradamus buffs would now be claiming that the "five and forty degrees" was obviously meant to refer to air temperature, too.
All in all, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is a much better fit for this one. So is the explosion resulting from the collision of the ships Mont Blanc and Imo in 1917, which killed thousands of people and destroyed much of Halifax -- a city just a few degrees shy of 45� latitude. In fact, the devastating Peshtigo forest fire (which occurred on the same night as the Great Chicago Fire) claimed 1,200 lives and occurred right on the 45th parallel.
What do "Normans" (what we would call "Vikings" or "French") have to do with hijacked airliners crashing into American cities? Nobody knows, but that hasn't stopped people from inventing all sorts of far-fetched explanations (e.g., "Normans" really means "North Americans" -- even though "Normans" had a very specific meaning in Nostradamus' time, and it certainly wasn't "North Americans.") Even if a prophecy contains something that makes no sense whatsoever, believers will find a way to make it fit.