US Cities and Disaster Preparedness

According to Nichols' interviews with Oregon State University scientists, "a major earthquake - such as the ones that have hit Indonesia, Chile, Haiti, New Zealand and now Japan - has a one-in-three chance of striking the U.S. in the next 50 years."

Reasons for concern in the U.S., according to Nichols:

- "The U.S. is not nearly as well prepared as Japan was," says John Orcutt, a seismologist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
- The U.S. is still not prepared for another tsunami, according to a report from the National Research Council.
- A study by the American Medical Association showed that 45% of the states with nuclear power plants had "no response for a nuclear disaster."