Is Canada ready for the next massive earthquake?

Jordan If you live on the West Coast, it’s there somewhere in the back of your head, the knowledge that one day it’s going to happen.

News Clips from 1989 Bay Area Quake …second base…(static)

…in the Channel Seven Newsroom. As you may have noticed, our power was knocked out, just as some of the pregame activity for the World Series is getting underway. That game is scheduled to start any moment now. Our power has been off in San Francisco and reports throughout the Bay Area. There’s also major damage in San Benito County…

…so I was in the upper deck right behind home plate just out here to watch the ballgame tonight. And when the first shake started to hit, there were several aircraft right above us, and I immediately started to think it was vibration from the aircraft. But then it really started to roll, really started to punch…

Jordan But there’s a difference between theoretically knowing that we are due for a massive earthquake and doing something, anything to prepare for it. And this is not just on the West Coast, more of Canada than you probably suspect is vulnerable to a bad quake that we are not ready for. Why aren’t we ready? Especially because this isn’t new information.

There are the usual suspects; real preparation costs real money and new spending from both private businesses and governments. And nobody wants that. It’s an inconvenience just to think about retrofitting buildings on a massive scale. Never mind actually doing that work. And if you haven’t noticed between the pandemic and the massive impact of the climate crisis causing unprecedented storms and wildfires, we’ve been busy in the emergency response Department. And there are psychological factors at play as well. as a species, we are not great at preparing for events before they happen, especially when everything seems fine. But the ticking geological clock doesn’t care about any of that. So, yes, the big one is still coming. Maybe tomorrow, maybe 20 years from now. But the only thing that seems certain at the moment is that we won’t be ready when it arrives.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is the Big Story. Gregor Craigie is the host of CBC’s on the island, and he is the author of On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake . Hey, Gregor.

Gregor Hi. Nice to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Jordan Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you for joining us. And I hope this episode is not too scary, but let’s just start with a big one. No pun intended. Are we overdue for a massive earthquake?

Gregor That’s a difficult one to answer precisely. And scientists have done a lot of work to hone in on it. But unfortunately, the big one off the West Coast of Canada, off the West Coast of Vancouver Island, which is the Cascadia subduction zone, the undersea earthquake. Scientists have been able to narrow it down to a pretty broad window of between 200 and 800 years. In other words, it happens every 200 to 800 years, and we are in that window. So in that sense, we’re on schedule for it. But because it’s such a broad window, the short answer is no, we’re not overdue. But we are in the window. We’re about 321 years honing in on 322 years since the last big quake, probably a magnitude nine. One of the world’s biggest earthquakes rumbled under the sea floor from Northern Vancouver Island all the way down to California. So we are on time, and it could happen anytime in the next few years or few centuries.

Jordan So either tomorrow or seven generations from now?

Gregor Exactly, which is one of the fiendishly difficult things about earthquakes is trying to prepare for something that literally could happen 10 seconds from now, or as you say, it could happen in seven generations. It could happen 300 years from now.

Jordan Right. And we’re going to talk about preparation, because that’s what a lot of your book is about and how we can do that. Certainly the excerpts I’ve read so far. But first, I also wanted to ask you, I think we tend to always focus on the West Coast when we talk about earthquakes, is any of that changing over the past decades, centuries? Are there risks of earthquakes more powerful in places that we typically haven’t had powerful earthquakes before?

Gregor Yes. The short answer is yes. And that was part of the motivation for writing this book, because a fair bit of attention has been paid to the West Coast. Now, as I write in the book, we haven’t prepared enough for it. But we’ve got a fairly good lay of the seismic land, so to speak, the geological landscape out here. But I was really surprised when I first started researching a book on West Coast earthquakes to learn that cities like Ottawa and Montreal, where I lived for a while and didn’t even know about it, have significant earthquake risks. Places like Quebec City, especially are at risk. And that’s because the natural hazards in the Western Quebec seismic zone between Ottawa, Montreal, and the Charlebois seismic zone north and east of Quebec City, pose a significant natural hazard.

Now, the seismic zones in Eastern Canada will not produce, geologists tell us they’re very unlikely to produce as big of earthquakes as we can expect here on the West Coast of Canada, especially off the West Coast of Vancouver Island. But they can be moderate earthquakes of magnitude six around Ottawa and Montreal and maybe even magnitude seven or above north of Quebec City. And if those are shallow enough, like they’re close enough to the surface, they don’t rupture way down beneath the surface. And if they’re close to cities with significant stalks of old, vulnerable buildings, especially brick buildings, then they can be a real risk. And to some of our biggest cities Jordan.

Jordan How come we never hear about that? I mean, I’ve lived in Montreal for periods of time, as you have, I’ve never even considered it. Now, I know Montreal does get tiny, tiny earthquakes every once in a while. So does Ottawa. Everybody’s kind of like, did you feel that? But the idea that something that could cause significant damage is possible in those areas is something I don’t think many Canadians ever consider.

Gregor I think you’re absolutely right. And as I was writing this book, I interviewed a lot of experts, and of course, they were aware of it. And there was a bit of frustration in many of their voices. I mean, people like a seismologist at McGill University, Christie Rowe, who grew up in California, in the Bay Area, and she knows what it’s like. She lived through the famous World Series 1989 earthquake. She wondered if her dad was going to get home from work safely because a lot of the freeways and the bridges were pancaking. People were crushed in them, and she was worried and wondering whether her dad would get home. He did. But all that to say that she knows firsthand what an earthquake can do.

And when I asked her about the risk in Montreal because she’s at McGill, she said, this is the frustration. We know there’s a natural hazard, but we haven’t studied it well enough to really quantify it. We know there are earthquakes here. There are historical records of significant earthquakes in Quebec going back three and 400 years, but we haven’t been able to get the funding to go out and study it because we can’t prove that there’s a risk. But you can’t prove a risk unless you quantify the natural hazard. So she talked about this kind of frustrating gray zone where it’s difficult to put more publicity on it. But it’s not just Montreal and Ottawa, we’re focusing primarily on Canada. But New York City is at risk, and many other cities around the world. And I spoke to a geologist, a veteran geologist in New York who said, with sea level rise, with climate change, with housing and the economy and the pandemic, for goodness sake, in many cities, it’s just more than people can take. And you say the word earthquake to them and they immediately don’t want to hear it. So I think a lot of times, even if it comes up, you can’t get people’s attention for something that may not happen in their lifetimes.

Jordan Tell me a little bit more about that, the paradox of preparation. Because this seems to be a theme that’s running through all your reporting on this from the West Coast to the east. And I understand that you make a great point that there is just so much going on in the world right now, it can be really difficult to think of another existential threat, but what has been done and what hasn’t been done and maybe on the West Coast in particular, where there is a very real threat, and we are due for one?

Gregor Yeah. I appreciate the way you phrased the question, what has been done and what hasn’t because I don’t want to suggest that no one has done anything. Because let me give you a personal example, Jordan, I’ve got three boys in three different public schools, and if they had all been born ten years earlier, all three of them would have gone to old schools here in Victoria that are deemed at high risk of collapse because they’re built with brick and no horizontal reinforcement. So if there had been an earthquake and they had been born ten years earlier, all three of the schools they would have gone to could have collapsed. But the BC government slowly but surely, they’re over budget and over time, but they are fixing vulnerable schools in Victoria, Vancouver and many other West Coast cities. So they’re getting there. And now two of the three schools that my kids go to have been seismically reinforced. In one case, it was just rebuilt. So we are making preparations. There’s been a number of bridges that have been fixed. There are plans to do all sorts of things. The BC government is investing in stronger hospitals. Just down the road from me here, there’s a new patient care tower about a few years old here in Victoria. So there have been meaningful improvements.

But the research I’ve done has shown that there is more work to be done. There was an assessment of the city of Victoria done by the city of Victoria, they commissioned independent engineers to look at the city’s building stock, and they found that in the big one, the offshore earthquake, that Cascadia Subduction Zone I mentioned, or even a smaller crustal earthquake closer to Victoria. They estimated that as many as two out of three buildings in the entire city would be completely off limits, after an earthquake, only about 5% of them would collapse, which is scary enough in itself. But two thirds of all buildings would be completely off limits. Imagine in whatever city you live in, one event in one afternoon or one morning, eliminating two thirds of the building stock in your city. And one engineer I talked to said, I think they were a little bit overzealous, but even if it’s one third, imagine what that would do to a city.

So there are so many old buildings here. Even my house, Jordan, I’ve started seismic retrofits on my house, but if the earthquake were to happen today, I hired an engineer to look at it, and it’s an old wooden house. There’s a good chance it would collapse on the basement. So I probably wouldn’t be hurt in the upper two floors. But my house would have to be torn down. I’d be homeless. I’d have nowhere for me and my family to live. So there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of buildings and structures that still need to be strengthened here on the West Coast, and there are no immediate plans to do that.

Jordan Okay, so explain to me then how that’s the case. And maybe this is my own naivete, but I assumed that buildings being built on the West Coast in earthquake zones were required to be up to code to withstand an earthquake. And that’s not the case, apparently.

Gregor Well, there’s two things there. The code is now strong enough that it requires that. But my house, for instance, was built in 1912. The BC Legislature, the old Parliament buildings are more than 100 years old. The famous Empress Hotel, two of the schools that my kids go to, were built before scientists knew there was a real earthquake risk here, and before earthquake provisions had been added to the building code. So that’s the first answer is that half of our buildings in Vancouver and Victoria, or well, at least in the city, the central cities of Vancouver and Victoria were built before stringent building codes.

Jordan When did those codes come into effect?

Gregor Gradually, gradually. The first specific seismic ones, depending on what part of the country you’re looking at, came into effect about 1970. So that leaves a huge number of buildings that were built with no seismic provisions. But even then, Jordan, the early ones didn’t have really strict seismic codes, like they would require, for instance, in concrete buildings, a few rods of rebar, or steel reinforcing bar to be put in the concrete. But now the codes are much stricter. The most recent codes of 2015 and 2020 have much stricter provisions.

But even then, just quickly, I wanted to say, engineers are debating this around the world. What should the building code do? Should it ensure that a building or a house that you live in today or work in today simply makes you survive an earthquake? Or should it mean that the building is so robust that it will withstand the earthquake and provide you with a place to live and work after? And the code doesn’t actually go that far. And that’s what a lot of engineers have said to me. They’ve said, no, the building code, even as it stands today, is only going to ensure that you survive. But you’ll probably be homeless or have no place to work after a really big earthquake.

Jordan So you’ve mentioned the term seismic retrofitting a couple of times. Maybe just explain what that is and what it entails. It sounds expensive, to put it mildly.

Gregor Yeah, and it really depends. It can be affordable. Let’s put it that way. For instance, my house, my 1912, two-storey wooden house, is about as easy as it gets for a seismic retrofit. My basement walls are weak, but an engineer, a proper structural engineer I’ve hired, has drawn me up plans to reinforce the weak two by four posts between the concrete foundation and the main floor joists with three quarter inch plywood, and he’s got a specific plan, but it’s fairly simple. You can hire a contractor, a lot of homeowners can do that. I’m hoping to do that for $10,000 or $12,000, which not everyone can afford, of course, but it’s doable.

But once you get up into bigger buildings, we’re talking about much more expensive fixes. I mean, imagine old three storey brick buildings in, say, the Byward Market of Ottawa or the downtown east side of Vancouver or Victoria’s Old Town. These are much more expensive to fix, 100 year old brick buildings that in some cases, have affordable rental apartments or shops or what have you. In some cases, you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars. You very quickly get up for bigger buildings into the millions. And it’s not only millions of dollars, but it’s displacing tenants and people and so on for retrofits that can be months or even years in the offing. So it’s easy to talk about it. It’s easy for a journalist like me to say, as many people do, we need more seismic retrofits, but it’s often a very big job, and it can be expensive, to your point.

Jordan How is that process governed? If these buildings are in the kind of danger that the experts you talked to have said, this is perhaps something that I would hope at least a caring government would force upon developers to make these retrofits to make their property safe. What exists right now to force property owners, especially those with tenants who are renting, to make sure their property will survive a big one?

Gregor Well, the short answer is not very much, at least not as much as there could be. For instance, the seismic renovation I’m doing on my house, and I have a University student who always lives in the basement. That’s what motivated me. I’m doing it in my own volition after writing this book. But no municipal government, no provincial government or federal government are forcing me to do that. I talked to renters all over Victoria in vulnerable three and four storey apartment buildings where half of the main floor doesn’t have a wall. They just have these fairly thin steel posts that prop up the building but allow for parking spots. There’s no municipal ordinances to make building owners do that, because they’re essentially grandfathered in.

But some governments, like the city of San Francisco, the city of Los Angeles, various jurisdictions in California, and to some extent New Zealand have started saying, look, we’re not going to force you to do this right away because we know owners can’t afford these things right away. It may force them to tear down their buildings. But nor can you ignore it forever. So what they’re saying is, we’re going to give you a decade, maybe 15 or 20 years. You have to identify the risk, hire an engineer, and then you have to tell us how long you’re going to take ten or 20 years. Places like San Francisco have done this, Jordan. They’ve given the owners 10, 20 years, but then they’ve said to them, point blank, if you don’t do this, you cannot charge rents. We’ll put a giant sign in three languages on your building walls to make sure everyone knows it’s an at risk building. You can’t charge rent. We’re not going to take no for an answer over ten or 20 years.

Jordan And there’s thus far been no movement in British Columbia towards that?

Gregor Not to that extent. Now, don’t get me wrong. If I were to pull a permit on my house and want to do a major renovation, that’s when the modern building codes kick in. I don’t want to say that there’s nothing going, but there’s no kind of Proactive demanding seismic retrofit program that I’m aware of. I mentioned the BC school program, that is the BC government deciding and making a commitment over successive governments that it’s going to do that. So they’re doing that. They’re doing that with hospitals and a few other public buildings. But there is no mandatory retrofit that I’m aware of along the lines of what we see in California cities.

Jordan This is maybe asking you to paint a whole lot of people with a broad brush, so please feel free not to do that. But I’m just trying to get a sense of what the appetite is among landlords and developers to take on these expenses. With an eye to averting future disaster. My mind goes instantly to the Florida buildings, the skyscrapers that collapsed earlier this year, and there is always that possibility, especially in an earthquake zone. So what’s the mood in terms of taking on risk now versus risk later?

Gregor I found it fascinating, Jordan, the range of response. I’ve talked to a leading structural seismic engineer in San Francisco, I sat up in a boardroom with him in an at risk high rise that was built in the 70s. But it’s got an at-risk weld. That means it’s the kind of American skyscraper—luckily we don’t have many in Canada—that could go down. But he pointed out various buildings to me, and he said they’re not doing anything, they’re not doing anything. Oh, but that one there the landowners are the landlords of this huge commercial skyscraper, have proactively just decided they’re going to do it, because it means they can get US federal government agencies and so on as tenants.

So there’s a bit of a mixed bag. You have some landlords being proactive. I see them here in Victoria. People taking retrofits just because they think they want to be safe, they want their tenants to be safe, and so on. And they do it of their own accord. But there are many others who say I can’t do this. And there was a telling letter in Portland, Oregon. I know we’re talking mostly about Canada, but I’ve heard this in Canada, too, but a Business Association in downtown Portland, pleading with the city Council not to force them to make renovations and seismic retrofits. They said if and when the big one comes, then Portland will rebuild out of the rubble. But notably, the letter didn’t make any mention of any dead bodies that might be in the rubble before that happened.

Jordan So we’ve talked about the buildings themselves at various stages of readiness. What about the province itself or even the country itself? What kinds of emergency plans are there on the West Coast of Canada for this kind of event? Are they frequently practiced? What do we know about how often they’re updated? How ready are we from a government point of view?

Gregor Well, I mean, there’s the official response and then the unofficial response. There are absolutely, if it’s not joint task force, it’s various cities, emergency teams who do various disaster responses. Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt out here takes place in regular exercises. We have military. We have emergency planning offices in every municipality. We have emergency management BC here provincial, an agency that’s got all sorts of detailed plans. But a lot of emergency planners I talked to behind the scenes, they’re not critical of anyone in particular, but they express a fear that we aren’t really ready for the big one.

I mean, even for instance, the official guidelines for homeowners is to have three days of emergency supplies in case there’s a big earthquake. But every planner I’ve talked to Jordan has said, forget that, you want to have weeks, if not weeks, months. Do not expect the government to look after you if we have a really major earthquake, especially if it’s the magnitude nine subduction zone quake off the West Coast because it won’t just be the city of Victoria. It will be the city of Vancouver. It will be the city of Seattle. So our American neighbours, who might otherwise be inclined to help will be taken up with all sorts of emergency response.

So the long and the short of it is we are prepared to an extent. There are plans. There are many officials at all levels of government. But I’ve talked to a lot of people, even in official positions, who say, really, we’re going to be in trouble if a big one happens in the next few years.

Jordan Given that then, what should people be doing on the West Coast, particularly, but also maybe if you’re a little worried now, if you live in Quebec City or Ottawa?

Gregor Yeah, honestly, I’ve been accused by a few people of just trying to scare people, and that really isn’t my goal here, Jordan. But if I scare people a little bit, just a little bit to go and get an emergency supply kit, I think it’s worthwhile. I really think that’s the first thing that individuals, offices, public places, which many have them anyway, and families should do. Get yourself an emergency supply kit. In many cases, many Canadian families have this mostly in the form of camping supplies. But maybe you can organize them and say to yourself because maybe it’s not even for an earthquake. Maybe it’s an ice storm or a Hurricane, depending on where you live in the country or a flood, but have enough food that you could be self sufficient for a couple of weeks, that you could camp out, that you have emergency medical supplies, that you have, cash, that you have, all the things that you might need. You have a prescription, you have copies of your passport. I won’t go through the whole list. You can easily find them through various cities, the Red Cross, and so on online. If you want to get a list and download and get your kit ready. But that’s the first thing. Get yourself an emergency kit because it could literally be the difference between life and death in an emergency or natural disaster.

But when it comes to earthquakes, beyond that, I think that everybody should take a midterm approach about getting their immediate surroundings retrofitted or at least safer. Now, you may not have the money to seismically retrofit your house, but you can at least do things like take a microwave off the top of a refrigerator or remove a really heavy glass mirror with wood frame above your bed, things that can and have injured and even killed people in earthquakes, really small steps that people can take to get ready. But in terms of buildings, I think that most building owners and or strata or landlords should take the midterm approach. We know we can’t do anything right away in many cases because let’s say you can’t find an engineer or you don’t have the budget to fix something. But does that mean you should just ignore it and stick your head in the sand and say, Well, I can’t do anything about it right now, so I’m just going to hope nothing happens?

I think most people should make midterm plans. Maybe you’re a homeowner and you say, okay, in the next five years, I’m going to hire an engineer, and then depending on what the engineer says, I’ll even give it ten or 15 or 20 years, but I’ll get this done and I’ll pay for it over the long haul. And maybe you don’t save your own life or protect your own safety, but maybe you protect the safety or save the life of someone 20 or 50 or 100 years from now because many of our buildings are going to be standing that long or longer.

Jordan Thanks so much, Gregor. This is fascinating.

Gregor Great to talk to you, Jordan. Thanks for this.

Jordan Gregor Craigie the author of On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake . For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN or email us thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!].

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Stefanie Phillips is the lead producer of The Big Story. Joseph Fish and Braden Alexander are our associate producers. I’m still Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Have a great weekend. Stay safe. We’ll talk Monday. Back to top of page