Consider if the recovery might be thwarted by airports unable to accept arriving crews, hospitals and shelters without power and water, the fallout from a high tech hub taken out of operations for months etc. There's also the conundrum that -- because there's no metric in place to differentiate between structures that would perform vastly differently under a seismic event -- there's no rational way to estimate the damage. You may be at once overpaying and overvaluing your earthquake insurance. Your insurance has no way of reliably estimating its risks, which undermines its solvency, which unwittingly reduces its worth to the consumer. One might not be in a position to rebuild.

The issue is that our society at present does not single out life-critical operations and provide for them accordingly. The cost-benefit analysis has not been done.