China's official Xinhua news agency Monday reported the Sichuan provincial government is saying 8,533 people were known for sure to have died in the quake, but the figure looks certain to rise dramatically in the coming days. The final death toll could be three or four times as many.

That is, unfortunately, usually the pattern after such catastrophes. It takes days to dig through all the rubble. And all the signs are that as quakes go, this was a particularly bad one.

The effects of the quake were felt in a wide radius hundreds of miles from the epicenter. Skyscrapers swayed visible in the coastal cities of Beijing and Shanghai, which are as far apart from each other as Boston and Washington. Beijing, in fact, is 930 miles from Beichuan. It was felt as far east as Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and as far west as the huge southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing, where more fatalities were reported.

The quake was reported as being 7.8 on the Richter scale, easily big enough to cause hundreds of thousands of casualties in unfavorable conditions.

And the conditions were unfavorable: Sichuan county is highly populated. One town had 80 percent of its building destroyed, reports said. Also, the quake occurred in the mid-afternoon, when schools and businesses were all packed solid with people.

The plight of 900 children reported buried in their school in the satellite town of Juyuan outside Dujiangyan City is particularly chilling. For Dujiangyan is 60 miles from the recorded epicenter of Monday's quake. If the quake could inflict so much heartbreaking carnage at that distance, the odds are likely that similar tragedies will be uncovered in the area in coming days, propelling the death toll ever higher. By 1:30 p.m. EDT, Xinhua had reported at least five more collapsed schools in Deyang city.

The principles for constructing buildings resistant to collapse during earthquakes have been known for at least 85 years since the Imperial Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright successfully rode out the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923 of 8.3 on the Richter scale that killed 140,000 people. Large buildings have a much better chance of surviving when built around a steel skeleton framework that allows the entire building to move as a unit when the earth ripples and shakes.

However, from California to Israel, breakneck construction and economic growth in historic serious earthquake zones along or close to major fault lines has continued for generations with no regard for the eventual consequences.

China's astonishing economic growth of the past 30 years has been carried out without any significant attention being paid to one of the most appalling natural disasters in the nation's history that occurred only a couple of years earlier -- the earthquake that destroyed the city of Tangshan on July 28, 1976.

Tangshan was filled with cheaply constructed high-rise apartment buildings and -- even worse -- most of the city was constructed over a rabbit-warren of old man-made caverns left over from decades of coal mining. The quake that hit was, at 7.8 on the Richter scale, almost exactly the same intensity as Monday's, and it killed at least 240,000 people. Entire city blocks of apartment buildings were swallowed up by the earth as the coal-mining caverns and shafts below them collapsed.

Because China is so densely populated, natural disasters there often create casualties on a scale almost unparalleled anywhere else in the world. The worst natural disaster by far of the 20th century is almost unknown in the West. It was a devastating flood along the Yangtze River in China in August 1931 that killed 3.7 million from drowning, disease and starvation.

The records of ancient Chinese civilizations claim even worse disasters in the distant past. The Shu-King, the records of the legendary Chinese Emperor Yao, tell of an immense wave "that reached the sky" before it flooded the entire land of China. The account states, "The water was well up on the high mountains and the foothills could not be seen at all." According to the ancient Chinese records, it took years of massive public works and the labor of millions to drain the land.

The 1976 Tangshan disaster was the worst earthquake of the 20th century in its human toll. One of the most destructive earthquakes in recorded human history was the 1556 quake in Shansi province, China, which killed around 830,000 people.

Even in China, however, such catastrophes only occur once every few centuries. The prayers of people around the world will be with the people of Beichuan this week that the quake they have endured was not in that class.