On 4 February, 1975, something approaching a miracle took place in Haichen City, Liaoning.
According to the Institute of Geophysics at the China Earthquake Administration, a combination of rising groundwater levels, unusual behaviour among the city's animals and a couple of small ground tremors persuaded officials that a major earthquake could be imminent. They promptly ordered a mass evacuation of the population.
As a result tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of lives were saved when a magnitude 7.3 magnitude quake struck hours later, destroying 90 per cent of the city's buildings.
Ever since, mainland seismologists have been convinced it is possible to predict the exact time and location of earthquakes. They have poured investment into trying to measure stresses in rock, observing animal behaviour and even looking for strange lights in the sky and other bizarre portents some believe precede earthquakes. All to no avail; the very next year they failed spectacularly to predict the 7.8 magnitude earthquake which flattened the city of Tangshan in nearby Hebei killing 242,000.
That failure should have taught the country's leaders a vital lesson: that accurately predicting earthquakes is impossible. The best anyone can do is enforce tightened engineering standards in seismically active areas, so that when earthquakes do happen, the casualties are minimised. The rapidly rising death toll from Monday's Sichuan earthquake indicates that this lesson has yet to be properly learned.
The devastation caused by Monday's earthquake should have been no surprise. According to a recent study by the Benfield Hazard Research Centre - known for its 2003 study of tsunami risk and its 2005 warning of heightened hurricane risk - Sichuan is the most exposed of all China's provinces to earthquake damage (see the chart below).