For those of us in the states, Burma's earthquake disaster, as it was seen in next-door Thailand, was heartbreaking.

It will inevitably draw back memories of 9/11 in New York.

Buildings collapsing into apocalyptic clouds of dust and people running:

A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand on Friday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. pic.twitter.com/wOb65quagE

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 28, 2025

Heartbreaking News????

A massive 7.7 quake devastates Mandalay, Myanmar, and impacts Bangkok, Thailand.

A Thread Not for the soft-hearted ⚠️ pic.twitter.com/7JnzJjJQHn

— Vertigo_Warrior (@VertigoWarrior) March 28, 2025

People falling from tall buildings to their deaths:

The 7.7 magnitude earthquake that occurred in #Myanmar also hit #China and #Thailand.

In #Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, the water from a pool on the terrace of a building spilled out due to the impact of the tremor, while those swimming in the pool fell down. pic.twitter.com/ouHRdg7osR

— ???????????????????????????????????????? (@HamdiCelikbas) March 28, 2025

Masses of people walking home:

Bangkok on Friday afternoon after the severe earthquake. Trains aren't running and taxis are scarce. So people have to walk home: pic.twitter.com/mr4zyFxdmh

— ฿คຖgk๐k-฿๐y - หนุ่มบางกอก ???????? (@Bangkokboy17) March 28, 2025

I am waiting for signs for the missing.

While the shock is horrible, and our sadness and concern for the wonderful people of Thailand (and Burma) is predominant now, one thing leaps to mind based on how we've seen the Thais react to disasters in the past:

They will clean up. They will rebuild. And they will do it quickly.

This is not Los Angeles, the Other City of Angels on the Pacific Rim (both Bangkok and L.A. mean 'city of angels'), where Democrat officials have told residents of fire-ravaged Altadena and Pacific Palisades they can expect to rebuild in around five years.

It's not going to be like that in Thailand, based on what we have seen in the past.

Thailand is no stranger to coups, military or otherwise. There have been fearsome riots there, leaving the place a mess, with fires, garbage and other signs of disorder ... and within days, the place is all cleaned up.

The quake was probably the worst ever felt in Thailand, and had to be a new one for them, a surprise, and probably felt worse than the 7.7 Richter scale intensity owing to the city being built on a swamp, which creates a Jell-O effect during a quake.

But they do know natural disasters, and the natural disasters they're most likely to be dealing with is storms and floods -- this Wikipedia page lists quite a few of them. Some have been terrible on its agricultural sector, which serves as the breadbasket to the entire region. Thailand also had a lot of disaster to deal with during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Yet in every instance, they got right to work and cleaned up right away to get back to normal.

They are ferociously self-sufficient self-starters and have even been known to turn down aid in the past when it was offered. And with huge floods and the damage therein, nobody has ever seen mass starvation or other horrors associated with an entirely ruined food supply. They save for rainy days.

Here is a 2011 editorial I wrote when I was an editorial writer at Investor's Business Daily about how to help Thailand when huge swathes of its territory, including much of its capital, was literally under water after a flood.

I haven't been following Thai affairs very closely in recent years, but I have lived in the region in the late 1990s, in Singapore, and made at least four trips to Bangkok for work or pleasure and know the cultural feel of the place.

They are trade oriented -- and nationalistic as any nation ever gets. They also understand that without a good economy, nothing else is going to work. So you don't see the surreal attitudes toward wokesterism or work that are very obvious in blue cities such as San Francisco or Los Angeles, where citizen flight is dismissed as unimportant, tax policy is only a matter of harvesting more from taxpayers, public money is viewed as bottomless, and bailouts are a natural and normal way of responding to self-induced crises.

They don't do things that way in Thailand. And I've yet to hear any tales of corruption that rival the recent report of $2 billion unaccounted for from the homeless fund in Los Angeles, nobody knowing where the cash went. I've seen less-than-transparent billionaires there, when I did the Forbes billionaire list for Southeast Asia some 20 years ago, but never the kind of stealing we now see in California -- or the bureaucracy, or the red tape, or the delays, or the utter failure to come up with a plan for quick recovery from disaster, such as we are likely to see from Thailand -- or for that matter, Japan in the wake of its tsunamis and quakes, or New Zealand in the wake of its Christchurch quake in recent years.

Knowing what we know of the Thais, they'll bounce back and get right to work to ensure it happens.

They may need to enact Mexico City standards for building construction, which since Mexico's 1986 quake, has made every earthquake since a minimal affair in Mexico and in all the nations that have copied it (which includes the U.S.). They may need to take earthquake-proofing technology and know-how from Chile's engineers, in a country that gets some monster quakes in the 9-range -- and no fallen skyscrapers. When I visited Chile around 2011, the Chileans showed how they put rockers and rollers into newly constructed buildings to ensure that the edifices would be able to withstand shaking from quakes.

But I am confident they will do this. We have seen them do it before. Bangkok will be back to normal as Los Angeles continues to stew in the ruins, the victim of atrocious governance with wokester blue leaders who don't see economies as important. Put them side by side and Thailand will be back to normal, while the bluesters aren't going to come out of this with anything to brag about.

One can only wish the Thais well as they work to recover.

Image: Screen shot from X video.