Like Finland, imagine everything that could go wrong

EACH day, the reported death toll from the earthquake in Turkey and Syria grows. It’s not just a local tragedy killing people far away. Natural disasters have struck, and will strike, around the world — including in the United States. What are their repercussions? What lessons can be learned from them?

Perhaps the most salient is this: Bad luck is inevitable and we must anticipate and prepare for it.

To Americans, our first association with earthquakes may be the one that destroyed San Francisco in 1906. It killed an estimated 3,000 people, but there have been at least eight documented earthquakes since the year 1500 with death tolls over 100,000 — including the 1923 Tokyo earthquake that killed 143,000 people, topped by one that killed nearly a million people in China in 1556.