Speaking as a retired geologist living on the slopes of an "active" volcano...denial is a major human trait.

Being prepared is EVERYTHING. Susan Hough makes that point again in her latest book---even IF (and I mean, if) EQFs signals and some other signals came before the quake, they were not useful. Wide scale, long term prediction is NOT useful for anything except being prepared. We simply can't predict quakes with enough accuracy right now to do anything in terms of evacuations, etc. We cannot evacuate every city along a line of longitude for something that may happen in several weeks.

Human beings are great at denial--and, alas, we actually need it to survive in some ways. I heard this morning that the city of Port au Prince was designed for about 150,000 people---and several million live there now. It seems that besides coffee, the major industry in Haiti is International Relief (sad to say). This poor place has the deck stacked against it. With such a huge population density and the desperation that this brings, the future still looks bleak.