Driving home earlier this week from a day at the office – which feels like a novelty now – I was preoccupied with dinner possibilities. Then the news came on the radio, stopping my menu-planning in its tracks; the lead story was on the horrific earthquakes affecting Turkey and Syria. I was no longer weighing the benefits of pasta versus stir fry.
The twin quakes are a calamity, with thousands dead and many others severely injured. Lives and landscapes were altered forever, in a flash.
Our immediate thoughts, of course, are with the victims, their loved ones, the chaotic hospitals. Homes and schools have been reduced to rubble. Those audio clips on the radio were crushing – the cries of children, the wails of adults, the anguish of somebody’s son, daughter, parent.
Geographically distant, this tragedy still hits close to home emotionally. But there’s something else: Canadians are not immune to this kind of natural disaster.
In 2015, like many people on the West Coast, I devoured The New Yorker’s piece, ”The Really Big One,” with its alarming subtitle: “An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.”
Writer Kathryn Schulz described what would happen if an earthquake measuring 8.7 to 9.2 on the Richter Scale hits the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ). “The northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound 30 to a 100 feet to the west,” she wrote.
Then, the tsunami: “The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, 15 minutes after the earthquake begins.”
The region, the article reported, would be unrecognizable. As one U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency official told Ms. Schulz: “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
The odds of that earthquake happening in the CSZ in the next 50 years, according to the article, were roughly one in 10. It’s now eight years later.
So if you live in Vancouver and you’re driving over a viaduct on your way home to your kid and your cat who are there on their own, and you hear a report about this calamity, your mind might well wander to your local what if.
I am a catastrophizer, which helps. But you don’t have to be neurotic to know that the Big One could happen any time in B.C. – like right now, as I’m typing this sentence at my kitchen table, or right now, as you’re reading it at yours. And many of us are ill-prepared.
In 2015, after reading that New Yorker article, I bought a flat of bottled water at Costco and put it in the hall closet. But when the closet filled up with cleaning supplies and ski equipment, I moved the flat to the garage. The bottles gradually dwindled as we started drinking the water. And now there’s no water.
There is also no wind-up flashlight or radio, no go-bag filled with immediate necessities. Other than the annual school form I hastily fill out on deadline day, listing some people who are permitted to pick up my precious child in case of a disaster, I have done no prep. I do not know how to erect a tent, build a fire or dress a serious wound. There is a sleeping bag in this house, somewhere. I think.
Every year, many B.C. schools and workplaces take part in a global earthquake drill called the Great ShakeOut. People learn and practise how to drop to the ground, take cover under their desks and hold on. So that’s something.
British Columbia is the most seismically active area of Canada, recording thousands of minor quakes each year, the Great British Columbia ShakeOut’s website advises. On Jan. 26, 1700, a magnitude 9 earthquake shook B.C., generating a massive tsunami. If such an earthquake were to hit now, the resulting tsunami is estimated to strike Tofino, on Vancouver Island, in 20 minutes. For Haida Gwaii’s Gwaii Haanas National Park, it’s 55 minutes. For Delta and Richmond here on the mainland, 2 hours and 15 minutes.
What is happening in Turkey and Syria is a catastrophe, and it is also a wake-up call. Our circumstances, such as building standards, may be vastly different, but we still need to be thinking about the possibility of something similar happening here. Seismic upgrades and emergency preparedness measures must continue, no matter the cost.
As we funnel our support into recovery efforts in Turkey and Syria, it would only be responsible to make time to think about what we will do if – when? – disaster strikes in Canada. And in the meantime? Hug your loved ones.
Editor’s note: (Feb. 10, 2023) A previous version of this column incorrectly described the time it would take for a tsunami from a magnitude 9 earthquake to strike Tofino, Gwaii Haanas National Park, Delta and Richmond.
Marsha Lederman