Look at this from MSNBC: Major quake could be worse than Katrina. Finally, people are figuring it out… no, wait, they aren’t.

Yes, we need to upgrade buildings to be more earthquake proof, but that takes a lot of time and a lot of money. It’s money well-spent, but it’s not going to happen all at once. It takes time to do that. An earthquake could strike long before that gets done. And what if the earthquake is so big it renders older retrofitting defunct? Will we put ourselves in an endless engineering arms war against earthquakes?

Let me stress once more, this earthquake retrofitting needs to be done. However, we can’t make ourselves 100% safe this way. We need money on disaster response. Things will fail; we need to be able to respond and adapt. Just retrofitting buildings is an example of brittle security. If it fails, we’re fucked. The city and state needs plans on how it can take care of people, on how to get around if a bridge collapses, etcetera.