[TOPERink]

For my understanding every natural calamity however tragic , they are unavoidable. Our mother earth's vulnerability to impermanence is just like with everything in the universe. We are all together in this experience. This has nothing to do with any personal karmic debts or punishment. If a large number of humans are to suffer from seemingly untimely demise like in Haiti, Pakistan or recently in Japan and the USA these are signs of the fragility of life itself. No one knows the time of departure. Actually these natural calamities are nothing special. Every minute a million or more people depart from us and probably just a little more than that are arriving....
The same applies to the animal kingdom. It is the shock of the calamity that wakes us up and we try to analyze why this happens.....not realizing that it happens all the time.