Image via Wikipedia

The reasoning in this article is compelling, in my view.  See: The Politics of Earthquakes; Too many countries are playing Russian roulette when it comes to seismic risk. LATimes, July 24, 2011.

Seismic risk mitigation is the greatest urban policy challenge the world confronts today. If you consider that too strong a claim, try to imagine another way in which bad urban policy could kill a million people in 30 seconds. Yet the politics of earthquakes are rarely discussed and, when discussed, widely misunderstood.

Take Japan’s Sendai earthquake on March 11, which released 600 million times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. The ensuing partial meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclearpower plant prompted international hysteria about nuclear power, but few seemed to realize that a far deadlier threat had been averted. As seismologist Roger Bilham aptlyput it, houses in seismically active zones are the world’s unrecognized weapons of mass destruction — and Japan’s WMD didn’t go off. Its buildings — at least those that weren’t swept away by the accompanying tsunami, a force of nature against which we are still largely helpless — remained standing, and the people inside survived.

That so few buildings collapsed in the earthquake was a human triumph of the first order. But cities around the world seem happy to ignore the earthquake threat — one thatis only growing as the cities themselves get bigger and bigger.