Be glad it is matched at all. I've never heard of a US campaign such as that one.

The death count is rising rapidly - 21,000 on the news this evening, and they're only beginning to approach some of the pancaked buildings that would have been full of sleeping people at the time of the quakes (4:17am local time). Earth "quake" hardly seems to cover it. And looking for a better word than "disaster" - synonyms offered by a Thesaurus website include: calamity, catastrophe, collapse, crash, debacle, defeat, emergency, failure, fiasco, flood, harm, hazard, holocaust, mishap, setback, tragedy, woe. Totally inadequate. I think one must turn to literature to characterise it. If this was one of Shakespeare's plays, it would be Titus Andronicus, the bloodiest of them all.

"O, could our mourning ease thy misery!"