No matter how prone world regions are to major earthquakes, they come as a shocking reminder of how devastating such natural calamities can be. The earthquake which struck Bam in southeast Iran last Friday is clearly in the major league, with estimates of more than 20,000 dead and tens of thousands injured.
The Iranian authorities were quick to appeal for international help and it has flowed with exemplary speed and efficiency. It must be followed by humanitarian aid to allow this historic city recover from the tragedy.
The immediate task has been to save as many people as possible from the ruins, following which providing tents, blankets, tarpaulins, cooking equipment and water purification facilities is the major priority. In the longer term, rebuilding plans must address a common failing of the construction industry in developing societies - that despite the known dangers, buildings are not made to withstand earthquakes. On the contrary, throughout its recent economic boom based on tourism and thriving citrus and date-based agriculture, Bam's housing and office buildings were constructed cheaply. It has become a terrible example of the observation by one expert over the weekend, that "earthquakes don't kill people, but buildings and builders of inferior buildings do".
The national and international response to such tragedies can break political moulds. Thus the generous Greek governmental and popular response to the comparable earthquake in Izmit, northwest Turkey, in 1999 set the scene for the remarkable improvement in relations between the two countries. That catastrophe also contributed significantly to political change within Turkey.
Iran has been in the news because of the prolonged struggle between the different factions which control its political structures. The more secularist forces grouped around President Mohammed Khatami remain in conflict with fundamentalist Islamists over the political inheritance from the 1979 revolution against the monarchy. They also differ over the response to international pressure about weapons of mass destruction. The recent agreement to allow intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to check whether Iran has a programme to build nuclear weapons signals a greater willingness to engage. This was widely seen as a gesture towards the European preference for dialogue with Iran, as distinct from the US policy of boycott and military threat.
The rapid and sympathetic international response to the Bam earthquake will hopefully broaden this approach and strengthen those Iranians who support it. In the same way it can feed into Iran's domestic politics by identifying those most responsible for the devastation and loss of life involved.
Whether this will make a real difference is doubtful, since a standing feature of such disasters is that while their lessons are learned intellectually, they are rarely implemented on the ground.