It was a horrible tragedy but as an event of 2008 most people are not likely to remember it.  Frankly, we're lucky we know anything at all about it.  Had it not been the year the Olympics were held in China, I doubt we'd have heard much about it at all.

This is  newstory that I often forget about as I go about my daily life but to think that over 70,000 people were killed is astounding to me.

The quake, estimated to have had a magnitude of 7.9, ravaged a mountainous region outside Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, destroying 80 percent of structures in some of the towns and small cities near its epicenter. Its tremors were felt as far away as Vietnam and set off another, smaller quake in the outskirts of Beijing, 900 miles away.

With a death toll in the tens of thousands, and infrastructure devastated in the affected areas, this is a major catastrophe.

Early estimates show 10,000 dead and counting.