Are the world’s quake zones prepared for another disaster like in Turkey and Syria?

Images of death and destruction broadcast around the world have prompted questions about the disaster-readiness of seismically active areas, writes Borzou Daragahi

Devastating earthquakes such as those that struck Turkey and Syria have a wider impact (AP)

In California, seismologists are warning that both Los Angeles and San Francisco are due for massive quakes. In India, there are grave questions about how tens of millions would fare should the unthinkable happen. In the Philippines, residents are discussing “doomsday” scenarios in which an earthquake would hit the sprawling capital.

In the Balkans, in the Middle East, in the earthquake-prone island nations of east Asia, and all along the heavily populated Pacific coast of the Americas, which rests along some of the most dangerous cracks on Earth, the same question resounded in the wake of the 6 February disaster that befell southern Turkey and northern Syria: are we ready for the big one?

“¿Estamos preparados?”, demanded the headline on a 19 February editorial in the newspaper El Diario in Colombia, where an earthquake in 1999 killed more than 1,000 people.