The total destruction of Xinjian Primary School and the death of as many as 900 students in Dujiangyan, China, during the May 12 earthquake is a powerful lesson on the consequences of shoddy design and construction practices. It also shows the need to have strict enforcement of effective seismic building-code requirements around the world in areas subject to seismic shaking.

The four-story school was not very old, reportedly built in 1992. That is new enough to take advantage of modern seismic design and construction research. It apparently was considered unsafe even when it was new, and serious questions now have been raised about the government role, design, materials and general construction that turned it into a death trap. How many more time bombs like this are ticking unnoticed in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world? That kind of detective work would be daunting on a macro scale, but the investigations should start on a micro level-one community and school at a time—so that this kind of lesson is not learned over and over, country by country.

Xinjian Primary School was just one of scores of schools that collapsed in the China quake, which killed as many as 80,000 people. The pattern of destruction shows large-scale institutional problems.

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One potential model for inspection and retrofitting is a plan now being considered by Seattle's Dept. of Planning and Development that would force owners of unreinforced-masonry buildings to retrofit them to seismic standards. The department is reacting to a study that detailed how damage from a serious earthquake would threaten public safety. The agency estimates that retrofitting 1,000 buildings could cost $430 million, and it is investigating public funding to help save historic structures.

Seven cities in California already have such retrofit laws, and Seattle would be the first outside of that state to impose such requirements. It is one thing to learn lessons of public safety from studies, but the next step must be to act—requiring retrofitting before an earthquake causes mass destruction.