Solid ground is not to be taken for granted

The lat­est death toll from this morn­ing’s earth­quake in Bam, Iran is over 20,000 with 50,000 addi­tion­al injured. The quake was mea­sured at 6.5 on the Richter scale, the same mag­ni­tude as Mon­day’s Paso Rob­les quake which killed two. Just yes­ter­day I was say­ing how «only two» can’t seem for­tu­nate to the fam­i­lies of those two women, but today I’m left only with a chill com­bin­ing grat­i­tude for mod­ern seis­mi­cal­ly-sound archi­tec­ture in the place where I live and a des­per­ate sad­ness at the loss of more peo­ple than I can imag­ine, who died because they live in a place with­out a thriv­ing «seis­mic retro­fit» industry.

Liv­ing in a wealthy coun­try is indeed the dif­fer­ence between life and death.