It was 5:36pm on March 27, 1964. Good Friday. At that moment, a 9.2 earthquake, the second largest ever recorded, struck the coast of Alaska near Anchorage.
The shaking lasted for four minutes. The geological disruption was huge and devastating. 131 people died as a result. If an earthquake of that magnitude had struck Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, the number of lives lost would have likely been in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.
This quake is a reminder that life can indeed turn upside down in the relative blink of an eye. It is naïve to think such an event could not happen again anywhere along the west coast of the United States.
Each geographic region on the planet faces similar catastrophic threats. The 2004 Christmas Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed over 250,000 people, is a case in point. Climate- and weather-related phenomena can bring immediate disruption of life and dreams. We are all vulnerable to sickness and the frailties of our bodies. And this, of course, is in addition to the capability of humans to spread disease and do violent harm to each other.
This leads us to consider three important realities:
The
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