Taiwan earthquake: How the island's two-decade preparation saved it.

When disasters happen, particularly when big earthquakes strike, the world's media is drawn like flies to the most dramatic destruction. It is understandable. But it often portrays a distorted picture of what has happened.

You can see it here in the city of Hualien. Camera teams are crowded around a 10-storey building leaning over at a terrifying angle. It all looks bizarre and scary. But that was only one of a handful of buildings which suffered structurally, in a city of tens of thousands.

A hundred metres away beyond the police cordon, the streets of Hualien look entirely normal. Shops and cafés are open, traffic is flowing. Drive through the city and if you didn't know a big quake had struck days ago, you wouldn't guess it.

The fact that this city has survived largely unscathed has sparked immediate discussion of how and why.

Just over a year ago, we saw earthquakes of about the same magnitudes striking Turkey and Syria, causing the deaths of more than 50,000 people. These countries, of course, had far fewer resources. But when a much smaller 6.7 magnitude quake hit the city of Christchurch in New Zealand in 2011, almost the entire city centre was flattened.

Taiwan is also often on the fault lines, but it has made significant progress in coping with shakes. Many say the wake-up call was Taiwan's 1999 Chi Chi earthquake - the worst in its history. It caused the deaths of more than 2,400 people and destroyed tens of thousands of buildings.

I witnessed the aftermath of that disaster. In the central county of Nantou many apartment buildings had been toppled. What was most striking was how many of them were brand new.

I remember a huge 20-storey building that had snapped off at its foundations and was lying flat on its side - still almost completely intact.

The catastrophic damage prompted a lot of anger and soul-searching about why so many brand new buildings had failed. Experts said their design was fundamentally flawed. The base pillars were not big enough, the amount of steel in them too small.

Their findings won't have been entirely a surprise: when I lived in Taipei in the 1990s, there were repeated construction scandals.