Charities globally are pleading for support to rescue and aid thousands of earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria. Among them are Doctors Without Borders, The Syrian Medical Society, UNICEF, Turkish Red Crescent, Syrian Red Crescent, The White Helmets and Save the Children.

You may have wondered what happened to the Richter scale, which was once commonly used to describe earthquake magnitude. It is still useful for smaller nearby quakes, but scientists now use a different calculation called the “moment magnitude scale” to measure distant and massive quakes. Whatever scale you use, the quake in Turkey, while devastatingly destructive, is not the worst on record, and much of the U.S. sits along fault lines that will one day experience significant quakes.

Earthquakes are often the subject of horror movies in which a super-quake measuring above a “10” strikes somewhere and devastates everything far and wide. But the U.S. Geological Service has looked at the potential for such a 10+ event and sees nothing that would produce such a catastrophe.

All the same, the best time to prepare for an emergency is before you face one, so spend a few moments here thinking through how you would respond if you are caught in an earthquake. And if you live in a quake zone consider obtaining an earthquake insurance policy. A standard homeowner’s insurance policy does not cover earthquake damage.