Earthquakes are a common event...go and live in Japan,Indonesia and California, all major earthquake zones, very few are as destructive as the eathquake we have just experienced especially to people thousands of miles away from the eathquake...We are improving our predictive capabilities it was detected by the US and some other observers...but who do you tell and what can they do once youve told them are the difficult questions.
I hope that communities can learn from this and put something in place to stop it happening again in the decades to come. Then it will just cost money and lifestyles not lives..and saying that will we ever make the world perfectly safe..No..but we can make or try to make disasters less costly in human lives.