Hi EQF,

You said, "When you are dealing with natural disasters such as earthquakes which can obliterate an entire city in a matter of minutes, you try to do everything possible and affordable to see if there is some way to avoid the damage. And such efforts would have to include forecasting the earthquake."

Scientists like Roger Billham of the University of Colorado and Brian Tucker of GeoHazards have spent countless hours with government officials in all of the high risk seismic zones where construction hazards are a problem. Most often the greatest obstacle is funding to replace exisiting stuctures. We have the same problem in the US as well. Look at Paso Robles, 80 of their downtown structures are red tagged today.

Earthquake forecasting or prediction can not ever reduce earthquake damage, that's a fact and one no one change.

Looking at Bam, they have not had a large earthquake since 1990 at least. The city was 2000 years old and they had no reason to believe they were in harms way and I'm quite certain there was no money to rebuild, so aside from a useful prediction from a qualified person, there was nothing that could have been done to avoid this disaster.

I have not seen any predictions delivered by anyone that conclusively predicted an earthquake for Bam, be it a scientist or otherwise. I do not believe there were any substantial precursors to this earthquake which would have proved useful.

Rolff Stephansson demonstrated to the Icelandic government that he had reason with evidence to believe there was going to be a 6.1 earthquake in that country and was very specific about its location. All emergency workers were put on alert and the earthquake arrived exactly as forecasted. It has netted him a 5 year fully funded program. I think that's a wonderful example of what can happen when you have qualified people working with governments.

Petra