This article provides a review of the new book The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters, by its author, Robert Muir-Wood. He is the CEO of Risk Management Solutions.  Worth reading and considering his negative views of emergency management as presently conducted.  Some excerpts follow:

If you want to understand what really drives the risk and what you need to do, it comes down to planning decisions. It comes down to building codes and their enforcement, and avoiding corruption in how the building-code process functions, because the building sector is typically the most corrupt sector of any country. The level of corruption, we know, correlates quite strongly with casualties in disasters.

To make all this happen we need to really educate people about their risks — improving risk literacy so that people understand the need for warnings and the need for evacuation procedures. There are lots of things that a city leader can do to get their city to be resilient. It involves really engaging with people and educating them about the risks .