I attended a talk a couple years ago at Cal Tech with Kerry as the speaker - He IS an honored person in the circles of Geology/seismology.

At that time his point was that we can live with earthquakes - it's a matter of the right building codes and not building on the fault lines. If 1% of existing buildings were retrofitted every year, then in 100 years there would be little to no danger of deaths from earthquakes. He gave a great presentation with pictures from the big Taiwan quake and others that I don't recall now.

It is obvious that he cares much to reduce the death and destruction that accompanies such phenomena. It's a terrible shame they didn't listen to him, but that's the way it is in a third world country with a population in the billions..

Canie