Earthquakes, death tolls and what can be done

With the death toll following the earthquake in Pakistan expected to be between 35-40 thousand and with 2.5 million left homeless something must be done to prevent such tragedy in the future. The best way to prevent earthquake deaths and damage is properly engineered buildings, and high quality materials. Now the $64,000 question is how do we do this worldwide, even in some of the poorest parts of the world? The only way I can think of engineered lumber.
What is engineered lumber? Engineered lumber is like a wooden I-beam, so you get the strength of a large high quality board, but it is made of waste wood and it is light for it’s load capacity. Why engineered lumber? Because engineered lumber can be made anywhere in the world from some of the lowest quality wood imaginable, but every piece is the same. Because the materials are so reproducible, buildings can be pre-engineered and cheaply prefabed on a house sized assembly line, or if that isn’t possible designed from simple load and stress table, and cut on site and nailed together. You can’t do that with brick or stone (both of with have a tendency to turn to rubble in an earthquake.) Real wood is often unavailable and if it is the quality is unknown. Reinforced concrete is nice but is expensive and can’t be made to with stand earthquake loads without some pretty serious engineering. Iron or steel are nice but are too expensive and require skilled labor. For single or multi-family homes the best choice for earthquake hardened buildings is engineered lumber. It isn’t as cheap as real wood in some places but its design, transportation, and labor cost is much lower. (I figure now that most of New Orleans is going to get condemned, since once a building floods it is cheaper to rebuild than repair, engineered lumber and a host of other high tech building materials will get their chance to shine. However, the price of construction materials especially sheet rock is going to go way up. So if you are planning to build a house or remodel I would wait, or at least factor it into your budget. End of tangent.)
While engineered lumber may be the way of things in cities where materials are available and building can be inspected, in rural areas this will be more of a problem. To this end I suggest engineers without borders, (it’s like doctors without borders, but different.) This group would travel to high risk areas, and find ways to use local materials to build houses that can withstand Mother Nature’s wrath. In areas that have had a disaster, the EWB can come in and figure out how the make the remaining structures safe, and how to best rebuild. Earthquakes are a fact of life but with proper foundation and framing design deaths and property damage can be prevented. In the mean time hope for no aftershocks and a lot of miracles.