Natural hazard: sleepwalking into tragedy

"Any investment in preparedness is a bargain in financial terms," asserts the Guardian in an editorial reporting on Zombie Preparedness Week in British Columbia, Canada, which was a campaign to enhance community preparedness for natural hazards such as earthquakes, wildfires, floods, storms or pandemics. With increasing urbanization, when disasters strike it is the poor who is the most hardly hit. As the recent disastrous impact of earthquakes in Japan and in Italy or hurricane Katrina in the USA remind us, "it makes sense to prepare a community for a disaster that may never happen, because if you prepare efficiently enough, then indeed it may never happen."