Here’s the truly scary thing about the 9.0-magnitude earthquake off Honshu Island and its resulting tsunami: Japan is a country that is lauded for doing preparedness right.

Japan is a rich, high-tech nation with much rough experience of seismic rumblings: those factors have led it to plan, and plan well, for disaster, with billions spent over the years on developing and deploying technologies to limit the damage from temblors and tsunamis.

Those steps almost certainly kept the death count lower than it might otherwise be - especially in comparison with the multitudes lost in recent earthquakes in China and Haiti. March 11, however, showed the limits of what even the best preparation can do.

“I’m still in shock,” said Ivan G. Wong, the principal seismologist of URS Corporation in Oakland, California, contemplating Japan’s efforts to resist earthquake damage and its parallels to building standards in America.

“This is really the best analogue we have for the United States,” he said, and “I’m just flabbergasted by the amount of damage .”

Mr. Wong noted that the Pacific Northwest region is at considerable risk of a strong earthquake from the Cascadia fault, which lies off the coast . And while the coastal zone of the Northwest does not have as much residential and business development as that slammed by the Japanese tsunami, the earthquake risks farther inland could well end up sustaining severe damage, he said.

“Steps are being taken, but there’s a lot of dams, there’s a lot of fixingthat needs to be done,” Mr. Wong said. “We’re decades away from being able to fix all our dams.”

The sobering fact is that megadisasters like the Japanese earthquake can overcome the best efforts to protect against them. No matter how high the levee or how flexible the foundation, disaster experts say, nature has the last word.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University in New York, warned that an earthquake in the United States along the New Madrid fault could kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in densely populated cities, like Minneapolis, Minnesota, and St. Louis, Missouri . All technology can do is to minimize damage , he said, and “on both of those fronts, we’re never going to be perfect.”

Given the limits of steel and concrete , much depends on preparedness , but in most of the country, simple disaster plans that include having a case of supplies, medications and important family papers are distressingly rare, Dr. Redlener said.

Dr. Redlener, the author of “Americans at Risk,” said the biggest problem is a failure to go so far as even Japan has to protect its citizens .

“ At a time when states are facing $175 billion in deficits and the federal government is trying to deal with very compelling issues of long-term debt and deficits, the likelihood of our being able to mobilize the resources to significantly improve disaster readiness is limited,” he said.

And yet there are few issues as important. W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency, said, “The lesson that you learn from this is that earthquakes don’t come with a warning. And that’s why being prepared is so critical.”

Even preventable disasters, however, get short shrift because of our aversion to long-term planning and commitment, said Russell Schweickart, the former Apollo astronaut. Mr. Schweickart has spent years trying to get people to focus on the risks that many might think of as pretty far out: asteroid impact.

Mr. Schweickart and others, however, estimate that asteroid impacts like the one that flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest in Siberia in 1908 happen every few hundred years, and should be taken seriously. Mr. Schweickart is chairman of the B612 Foundation, which advocates monitoring near-earth asteroids to find the ones that might someday strike this planet. With proper research and financing, he noted, it should be possible to divert a space rock and avoid disaster.

Moments like the Japanese quake, Dr. Redlener said, are often referred to as “wake-up calls” that could lead to change. But after so many examples that lead to so little change, he argued, “it’s more like a snooze alarm” that jolts us for a moment; in no time at all, he said, we “drift back into a level of complacency.”


By JOHN SCHWARTZ