Just after 8 a.m. on 20 April 2013 (00:02 UTC), a magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck Lushan County in the mountains west of Chengdu, Sichuan province, rupturing a blind reverse-thrust fault at the southern end of the Longmenshan belt only about 14 km down. USGS flagged it red, its highest alert. Around 196 people died, some 11,500 to 15,500 were injured and roughly 193,000 houses collapsed, concentrated in Lushan and Baoxing counties.
The comparison that frames everything about Lushan sits five years and 80 km away: the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, one magnitude-unit larger on the same fault belt, had killed close to 90,000 people. Lushan's much smaller toll owed to it striking in daylight, to being roughly 32 times less energetic, and to a region partly rebuilt since Wenchuan, not to any change in how the risk was insured. Of the roughly US$14bn of direct economic loss, only about US$250m was covered, a 98% protection gap that helped push China towards its first residential earthquake-insurance pilots in 2014 and the pooled CREIP scheme in 2015.