Ten years ago on a cold dark night

It was before dawn on 17 January 1994 when a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the northern Los Angeles region, killing 57 people and causing more than $20 billion in damages. Considering what similar quakes do elsewhere in the world, that is an amazingly low casualty count. But we could still do a lot more to make earthquakes less expensive, starting with earthquake engineering. Yesterday was Earthquake Day in Kathmandu, Nepal, another example of increasing seismic safety in a part of the world that really needs it.