There are disasters that can come out of teh blue and are so big that nothing could help.   But many, perhaps most dissters aren't like that. There's some kind of warning, and responding the right way can make a real difference.

If you are living in a place where earthquakes can be expected, you build appropriately. The Japanese used to build houses out of paper and wood with that in m ind; now they use reinforced building techniques, which is another way of dealing with the same problem.

The tsunami only killed the numbers it did because there wasn't any effective early warning system. If it happened in the Pacific, there would be such a warning for people on America's West Coast. (Whether it would be used in the most effgective way is perhaps rather more questionable in the light of what happened last week.

The important thing is to have competant people work out in advance what could be done to minimise loss of life in any disaster, and get those plans properly worked out, and the necessary preliminary work and resource allocation done in advance.

Of course I doubt if any of that is going to be done in the USA unless there is a thorough clear-out of the crooks and incompetants you seem to have allowed to run things. And stop pretending that everything has to be done by private profit dominated operations, and buddies of the fat cats.