Staring natural disaster in the face

WRITING FROM PADANG, INDONESIA — I went to a flattened college on Saturday. The names of the dead were scrawled on a sliver of salvaged dry-erase board. A crowd of gawking teenagers hovered near an excavator working the rubble, along with the dowdy, fidgeting headmistress. Periodically sobbing parents were hanging about in the background. When the searchers reached five students crushed below a staircase, and soldiers emerged from the rubble bearing black body bags, a grim practice followed: A rescue worker would bring a student's putrid backpack or purse to a shocked mother or father to confirm whom they'd found. And the waiting youngsters with camcorders and cellphone cameras flocked around the scene like moths to a light.

"It's Indonesian culture," said a young social worker from Jakarta, watching the scrambling crowds.

I'll raise him one. It's universal culture. The innate drama of life and death, ramped up by natural disaster. Survivors and observers -- we're always the obliging spectators, either pushing the boundaries of decency on site or sitting on the couch at home.

Here's the real trouble with this culture: We haven't figured out how to convert our post-disaster fascination into an enthusiasm for pre-disaster adaptation. We don't quite know how, or aren't quite willing to convert, a robust body of information about hazards into action, especially in the developing world.

An earthquake, tsunami and typhoon-filled week like the last one only confirms our preference for reacting to hazards after the fact. West Sumatra's situation is one of the most frustrating. More than 70 aid agencies and millions of dollars worth of help are pouring in here, as they should, with the right spirit even if aid doesn't get to the neediest. But another point of urgency might have come almost five years ago after the Aceh earthquake and tsunami to the north, when scientists, using a history of earthquakes extracted from offshore corals, unequivocally forecasted more major activity and tsunami potential along the Sunda megathrust fault here.

The West Sumatran government in Padang, however, seemed only mildly interested in motivating people to change -- offering little in the way of education or proactive urban planning in a compact city of 900,000 squeezed in next to the ocean. The attitude changed after a hard shake from a magnitude 7.9 quake offshore in 2007, and there have been efforts since then to identify tsunami escape roads and safe buildings. The irony is that many of the tall buildings identified as havens in case of a tsunami crumbled in last week's quake.