M7.9 Earthquake in Nepal
This is awful for people there.<p>I don't want to be rude about the 3rd world, but there are techniques for making structures that mitigate the effects of a quake. Of course there are impediments to implementing these things (economic, legal), but every time I hear about collapsed buildings and such I wonder how many people would have been saved. 7.9 is quite a lot though, and you'd expect deaths even in modern countries.<p>The other sad thing I've noticed is the death toll. No idea if this is actually true, but it feels like with 3rd world disasters, the estimate just keeps climbing every day. In the West it's often the other way (people don't come back to life, it's just that the initial estimates come down, for instance Sep 11 went from 50K to 3K).