Steve...maybe you know this, but I imagine that both Kerry Sieh for Sumatra and Ross Stein for Turkey expected that it was likely that the earthquakes would occur in the next couple of decades...that they did not know how imminent they turned out to be. I don't think that they are able to predict that there will be an earthquake in a 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year period...and only know that there is some probablilty that there will be a quake in a 10 year period...so, they are not holding anything back on that. On the other hand, it does take a long time to get a paper published...it can take years (it takes me years)...and if you publicize it ahead of publication, you hurt its chances, or even preclude it being published in journals like Science, Nature, Geology.
I have that problem now...I know stuff about a fault system beneath Los Angeles, but am waiting on a Grad student to finish something on it, and don't have time myself to write a second paper because I'm having trouble in review with another paper. So, I wrote the important stuff into a SCEC report (which is online) and made sure that a few people who matter knew about it...and posted some of this here..
Chris