There’s a grim familiarity to what the world is witnessing in Turkey and Syria, where powerful double earthquakes spread death and misery over such a wide area.
Although the potential damage rates are among the worst in human experience, earthquake readiness continues to lag in resources and public policy in many of the most vulnerable regions of the earth. As in this disaster, earthquakes hurl into poverty hundreds of thousands of people who have scant resources to sustain them—and the cost in human life is appalling.