IMO the main lesson from Burma doesn't have much to do with practical preparation.

The problem is Not a question of people unprepared. The problem is that you have several million people so dirt poor and desperate to find a place to scratch out a hand-to-mouth existence in an overpopulated country that they are forced to move out into tidal flats, marshes and delta swamp areas whose elevation above sea level can be measured in inches using only a normal compliment of fingers.

This is a situation of overpopulation, desperate poverty and people forced to take desperate risks to have even a minimal hope of scratching out enough food to stay alive.

Had some organization equipped each family with a back pack full of supplies the day before the typhoon made landfall and the outcome wouldn't have been different in any major way. The water and winds swept ashore and destroyed even the few substantial structures. The people had no place to store what little they had and most had no place to run.

The single most important thing that could be done would be to eliminate the need for people to live in these lowlands. Which, long-term, means population control. Had the people lived inland and only gone out into the flats to farm they would have had a place to go and a transportation system capable of getting them inland. Presented with a storm the people would evacuate.

As it was the people had nearly nothing before the storm. No resources to prepare if they wanted to. They were on land everyone knew would flood. But they had nowhere else to go. Now with even less to work with. Packed into the few bits of dry land and around the few available resources their half-starved bodies are subject to starvation and disease. Many will not survive.

Even getting aid to them now is sadly laughable. Aid or no aid they will, until something major changes, just go back to where they were. Where they will have more children and scratch out a bare existence until the next storm comes.

As tragic and sad as the losses, estimated in the tens of thousands now, are they pale against the numbers long-term. Every few years another ten or twenty or one-hundred thousand will die. Perhaps three times that every decade. Thirty times, or many more because of the rising population, every century.

So we see the same call for aid and sad faces and the tugging at the heart strings. But in a few months everyone will forget. The same mantrap of a situation will exist as poverty and overpopulation force people to live with the Sword of Damocles over their heads.

Unless we, they, are willing to address the underlying causes of this situation we are largely just soothing our own consciouses by handing out what amounts to smiley-face band-aids and lolly-pops at a massacre.