Comment by Mountain_Skies

Many good lessons from this, including the importance of speaking up, one person making a difference, and the importance of drilling down into sources. The Wikipedia article used to state "This was in spite of the fact that up to 200,000 people could have been killed in a potential collapse." using an article in the magazine 'Cross Currents' as the source. If you follow that through the layers of citations, it turns out the 200,000 figure came from an unnamed source at the American Red Cross, which really isn't a reasonable source of such an estimate. I felt a bit chagrined to have used that number when explaining the situation to my nieces about how important it can be for one person speak up and not default to assuming those in authority always have a full understanding of a situation.