Are you doing disaster planning for earthquakes, or a telecom industry meltdown? Can you treat them the same?
The article mentioned in the prior posting implies the folks at eBay do.

Do they have similar distributions?

Indeed they are quite similar. This graph shows how the distribution of earthquakes vs. scale is another power law curve. Most of the energy(wealth) is reserved for the very rare very huge earthquakes.

Humm… what about tornados.