ABSTRACT
When disaster mitigation advocates reported in 2006 that a well-known international non-governmental organisation (NGO) had to tear down several hundred newly-built houses because they were found to be unsafe, some viewed this as the ‘good news’. The bad news was that many more unsafe reconstruction projects would remain undetected until the next disaster. Similarly, in 2004, a consultant to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) reported ‘good news’. In Kabul, he had convinced USAID to retrofit hospitals and schools built since the end of the 2001 war which overthrew the Taleban government, in order to make them more seismically resistant. The bad news was that other international donors said that there were not enough funds for such earthquake safety.
