Roger, try checking the sci.geo.earthquakes Newsgroup archives for May 27, 1998. There you should find one of my relatively few public warnings for an earthquake which I thought might occur in Iran or Afghanistan by May 30, 1998. And on May 30 one in Afghanistan reportedly claimed some 5000 lives.

The warning had time, magnitude, possible location, and detection procedure information in it.

I sent a FAX to that U.S. group in Golden, Colorado on December 30, 1994 warning them to begin watching for a potentially highly destructive earthquake. And I believe that the one I was expecting was the Kobe earthquake which occurred a little more than 2 weeks later. Another 6000 or so lives were reportedly lost.

When that devastating India earthquake occurred in January of 2001 I had already been on and off the telephone for about 5 hours with people in one of the top international disaster mitigation groups trying to get them ready to respond to what I thought might be a massively destructive earthquake. I could probably get that conversation confirmed by the authorities involved without too much trouble. Another 10,000 or so lives were reportedly lost.

Is there some lost lives threshold value here which we need to reach? And then people will admit that it might actually be possible to predict earthquakes and get at least some people out of their way? If so then let me know what that number is. I myself feel that we should have passed it a long time and many lost lives ago.