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Moderate earthquake off west coast of B.C.

Magnitude 5.7 earthquake 208 kilometres west of Port Hardy was lightly felt.

A 5.7 magnitude earthquake was detected Thursday at 6:48 a.m. PT, 208 kilometres west of Port Hardy, B.C., in the Pacific Ocean.

There is no tsunami threat, nor was there any damage, although there were reports the quake was “lightly felt” in Port Hardy.

Seismologist Alison Bird said the earthquake took place in an active area, but is not significant.

Earthquakes that register between 5 and 5.9 in magnitude are classified as moderate.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/moderate-earthquake-off-west-coast-of-b-c-1.3241719

Fraser Valley shaken by second earthquake this week

Mission’s 2.6 magnitude quake early Saturday morning comes after Abbotsford area hit.

A small earthquake shook the Fraser Valley early this morning just after 4:30 a.m. PT.

It measured a magnitude of 2.6 and was centred east of Mission, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

This is the second quake this week, following a 2.4 magnitude one that registered near Abbotsford on Thursday, August 27.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fraser-valley-shaken-by-second-earthquake-this-week-1.3208598

Fracking-induced earthquakes could leave workers vulnerable, says geophysicist

Seismic scientist David Eaton says Canada’s fracking-induced quakes are the biggest in the world.

A leading seismic scientist says B.C.’s energy infrastructure and gasfield workers may be vulnerable to earthquakes caused by fracking.

Earthquakes triggered by fracking have been felt in Fort Nelson and Fort St. John, but University of Calgary geophysicist David Eaton says the shaking is strongest in remote areas near fracking sites.

“Certainly in the immediate area where there’s infrastructure established by the oil and gas industry, including pipelines and well bore casings, then it’s something that really requires some careful analysis,” said Eaton.

Fracking, the common name for hydraulic fracturing, is the process of injecting water, sand and chemicals at high pressure deep underground to break rock and free gas.

New research shows fracking-induced quakes are shallow, so they trigger stronger ground motion and shaking — potentially damaging in places without much earthquake preparedness.

Eaton, part of a national research network looking into “induced seismicity” — earthquakes caused by fracking — in northern B.C. and Alberta, says energy regulators are taking the issue “very seriously.”

The quakes are hitting far from cities and towns, he said, but pipelines, gas wells and workers at fracking sites are all vulnerable.

“If people are being shaken up by ground motions, then it makes it a matter of public concern,” he said.

WorkSafeBC spokeswoman Trish Knight Chernecki said she’s not aware of any workplace injuries caused by seismic activity.

“Our officers in the northeast of B.C. continue to inspect oil and gas workplaces and hold employers accountable for the health and safety of their workers including maintaining the safety of industry infrastructure,” she said.

Fracking triggered 2014 quake

Eaton’s concerns come amid the news that fracking triggered a 4.4-magnitude earthquake in northeastern B.C. last year, one of world’s largest earthquakes ever linked to the controversial process.

The 4.4-magnitude quake was felt in Fort St. John and Fort Nelson in August 2014. It was preceded by a 3.8-magnitude earthquake in late July, also caused by fracking.

In January, Alberta’s energy regulator reported fracking likely caused a 4.4-magnitude earthquake in the northern town of Fox Creek.

Meanwhile, B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission continues to investigate whether a 4.6-magnitude quake only three kilometres from a fracking site was triggered by hydraulic fracturing this month.

Why is Canada different?

Eaton said the fracking-related earthquakes seen in Canada are different from those felt in the U.S.. In the U.S., larger earthquakes have been triggered — but they’re due to disposal of fracking wastewater, not fracking itself.

“Of all the induced earthquakes that are directly related to hydraulic fracturing, the ones we’re seeing in Western Canada are certainly at the top,” said Eaton.

“Worldwide [these quakes are] the highest magnitude events that are attributed to hydraulic fracturing anywhere in the world.”

Research is ongoing into why such large quakes are being triggered in Canada by fracking alone.

“It’s much different in Western Canada than in Oklahoma and Kansas — why is it different? That’s the topic of intensive research. It’s too early to say right now.”

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fracking-induced-earthquakes-could-leave-workers-vulnerable-says-geophysicist-1.3205262

The Really Big One

An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.

When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three. The conference was wrapping up for the day. He was thinking about sushi. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The earthquake was not particularly strong. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The shaking intensified. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside.

It was March. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow on the ground. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the ground. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. It was, Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas. The quake passed the two-minute mark. The trees, still hung with the previous autumn’s dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. Goldfinger lurched over to take a look. The base was lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the yard. He thought better of it, and lurched away. His watch swept past the three-minute mark and kept going.

Oh, shit, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in amazement. For decades, seismologists had believed that Japan could not experience an earthquake stronger than magnitude 8.4. In 2005, however, at a conference in Hokudan, a Japanese geologist named Yasutaka Ikeda had argued that the nation should expect a magnitude 9.0 in the near future—with catastrophic consequences, because Japan’s famous earthquake-and-tsunami preparedness, including the height of its sea walls, was based on incorrect science. The presentation was met with polite applause and thereafter largely ignored. Now, Goldfinger realized as the shaking hit the four-minute mark, the planet was proving the Japanese Cassandra right.

For a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake science. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool, because Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in Kashiwa knew what was coming. One of them pulled out a cell phone and started streaming videos from the Japanese broadcasting station NHK, shot by helicopters that had flown out to sea soon after the shaking started. Thirty minutes after Goldfinger first stepped outside, he watched the tsunami roll in, in real time, on a two-inch screen.

In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. The shaking earlier in the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in the nation’s recorded history. But for Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world’s leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come.

Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, 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 thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) 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, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.

In May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, together with their Corps of Discovery, set off from St. Louis on America’s first official cross-country expedition. Eighteen months later, they reached the Pacific Ocean and made camp near the present-day town of Astoria, Oregon. The United States was, at the time, twenty-nine years old. Canada was not yet a country. The continent’s far expanses were so unknown to its white explorers that Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the journey, thought that the men would come across woolly mammoths. Native Americans had lived in the Northwest for millennia, but they had no written language, and the many things to which the arriving Europeans subjected them did not include seismological inquiries. The newcomers took the land they encountered at face value, and at face value it was a find: vast, cheap, temperate, fertile, and, to all appearances, remarkably benign.

A century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of quiet. It took another fifty years to uncover and interpret the region’s seismic history. Geology, as even geologists will tell you, is not normally the sexiest of disciplines; it hunkers down with earthly stuff while the glory accrues to the human and the cosmic—to genetics, neuroscience, physics. But, sooner or later, every field has its field day, and the discovery of the Cascadia subduction zone stands as one of the greatest scientific detective stories of our time.

The first clue came from geography. Almost all of the world’s most powerful earthquakes occur in the Ring of Fire, the volcanically and seismically volatile swath of the Pacific that runs from New Zealand up through Indonesia and Japan, across the ocean to Alaska, and down the west coast of the Americas to Chile. Japan, 2011, magnitude 9.0; Indonesia, 2004, magnitude 9.1; Alaska, 1964, magnitude 9.2; Chile, 1960, magnitude 9.5—not until the late nineteen-sixties, with the rise of the theory of plate tectonics, could geologists explain this pattern. The Ring of Fire, it turns out, is really a ring of subduction zones. Nearly all the earthquakes in the region are caused by continental plates getting stuck on oceanic plates—as North America is stuck on Juan de Fuca—and then getting abruptly unstuck. And nearly all the volcanoes are caused by the oceanic plates sliding deep beneath the continental ones, eventually reaching temperatures and pressures so extreme that they melt the rock above them.

The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major earthquake—or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver. The question facing geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction zone had ever broken its eerie silence…

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

Weather Underground – The arrival of man-made earthquakes.

In the fall of 2011, students in Katie Keranen’s seismology course at the University of Oklahoma buried portable seismograph stations around the campus, in anticipation of a football game between the Sooners and the Texas A. & M. Aggies. The plan was to see if the students could, by reading the instruments, detect the rumble of eighty-two thousand fans cheering for a touchdown. “To see if they can figure out if a signal is a passing train or a cheering crowd—that’s much more interesting for them than discussing data in theory,” Keranen, an assistant professor of geophysics, told me.

But at 2:12 A.M. on November 5th, the day of the game, people in seventeen states felt an earthquake of 4.8 magnitude, centered near Prague, Oklahoma, a town of roughly twenty-five hundred, which is about an hour’s drive from Norman, where O.U. is situated. The students quickly packed up the seismographs and headed to Prague, hoping to measure the aftershocks. “Obviously, this was more worthwhile than a game,” Keranen said.

Outside homes around Prague and nearby Meeker, Keranen and her students, along with Austin Holland, the head seismologist of the Oklahoma Geological Survey, buried their equipment. Portable seismographs look like mini-kegs, or time capsules, and they need to be placed underground and on a level. The researchers wanted to install them quickly, since the ground was still shaking.

Shortly before 11 P.M., people in Prague heard what sounded like a jet plane crashing. It was another earthquake, this time a 5.6, followed, two days later, by a 4.7. (The earthquake scale is logarithmic, so a 5.0 earthquake shakes the ground ten times more than a 4.0, and a hundred times more than a 3.0.) No one was killed, but at least sixteen houses were destroyed and a spire on the historic Benedictine Hall at St. Gregory’s University, in nearby Shawnee, collapsed. Very few people had earthquake insurance; the five million dollars needed for the repairs at St. Gregory’s was raised through crowdfunding.

The earthquakes were big news, but the victory of the Sooners—the name comes from the term for those who broke the rules of the 1889 land run and staked claims in advance—was followed more closely. Few noticed that Keranen and her team had gathered likely the best data we have on a new phenomenon in Oklahoma: man-made earthquakes.

At the time, earthquakes were a relatively rare event for Oklahomans. Now they’re reported on daily, like the weather, and generally by the weatherman. Driving outside Oklahoma City one evening last November, I ended up stopped in traffic next to an electronic billboard that displayed, in rotation, an advertisement for one per cent cash back at the Thunderbird Casino, an advertisement for a Cash N Gold pawnshop, a three-day weather forecast, and an announcement of a 3.0 earthquake, in Noble County. Driving by the next evening, I saw that the display was the same, except that the earthquake was a 3.4, near Pawnee.

Until 2008, Oklahoma experienced an average of one to two earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater each year. (Magnitude-3.0 earthquakes tend to be felt, while smaller earthquakes may be noticed only by scientific equipment or by people close to the epicenter.) In 2009, there were twenty. The next year, there were forty-two. In 2014, there were five hundred and eighty-five, nearly triple the rate of California. Including smaller earthquakes in the count, there were more than five thousand. This year, there has been an average of two earthquakes a day of magnitude 3.0 or greater.

William Ellsworth, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey, told me, “We can say with virtual certainty that the increased seismicity in Oklahoma has to do with recent changes in the way that oil and gas are being produced.” Many of the larger earthquakes are caused by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground. (Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.) Disposal wells trigger earthquakes when they are dug too deep, near or into basement rock, or when the wells impinge on a fault line. Ellsworth said, “Scientifically, it’s really quite clear.”

The first case of earthquakes caused by fluid injection came in the nineteen-sixties. Engineers at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a chemical-weapons manufacturing center near Commerce City, Colorado, disposed of waste fluids by injecting them down a twelve-thousand-foot well. More than a thousand earthquakes resulted, several of magnitudes close to 5.0. “Unintentionally, it was a great experiment,” Justin Rubinstein, who researches induced seismicity for the U.S.G.S., told me.

In recent years, other states with oil and gas exploration have also seen an unusual number of earthquakes. State authorities quickly suspected that the earthquakes were linked to disposal wells. In Youngstown, Ohio, in 2011, after dozens of smaller quakes culminated in a 4.0, a nearby disposal well was shut down, and the earthquakes stopped. Around the same time, in Arkansas, a series of earthquakes associated with four disposal wells in the Fayetteville Shale led to a ban on disposal wells near related faults. Earthquakes were also noted in Colorado, Kansas, and Texas. There, too, relevant disposal wells were shut down or the volume of fluid injected was reduced and the earthquakes abated…

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/weather-underground

Key Vancouver emergency rooms likely to crumble in major quake

VGH and St. Paul’s ERs among many aging Metro hospital buildings found to be at high-risk of collapse or being rendered useless by a strong tremor.

Vancouver’s two largest emergency rooms are at high risk of collapse in an earthquake, along with many other aging hospitals and health care buildings across the Lower Mainland.

New seismic risk assessments show major buildings that house hundreds of patients — including the Vancouver General Hospital’s 12-storey Centennial pavilion (built in 1959), the north building of the Jim Pattison pavilion that houses the VGH emergency department (built in 1978), and the almost 100-year-old St. Paul’s Hospital in downtown Vancouver — are at high risk to collapse or suffer widespread damage in an earthquake.

Major buildings at the UBC Hospital, Richmond General Hospital, Lions Gate Hospital, Burnaby General Hospital, Langley Memorial Hospital, the B.C. Children’s Hospital and the B.C. Women’s Hospital have also been flagged at the highest earthquake risk in the reports.

Many of Metro Vancouver’s hospital and health care buildings were built before 1970, when the province adopted modern seismic building codes.

Consequently, the concrete or masonry structures lack the elasticity and strength to “bend but not fail” with an earthquake’s shocks, and they are more likely to experience failure in the walls and columns that support the floors and ceilings, said Clint Low, a senior partner at Bush, Bohlman & Partners LLP, the structural engineering firm contracted to do the assessments.

“If it’s rated very high, it may not collapse during the earthquake but it’d likely be unsafe to occupy post-earthquake, which is a big issue for a hospital,” said Low. “If you can’t occupy your hospitals, where do people go?”

If emergency rooms were unusable, patients would likely be triaged by medical teams outside, like during the Stanley Cup riots in 2011, said Jeanette Beattie, the Lower Mainland director for Health Emergency Management B.C. There’s a mobile medical unit available.

The B.C. government has spent $2.2 billion to seismically upgrade or replace 214 schools since 2001.

But it has no seismic upgrade program for hospitals, despite their importance as a rallying point for displaced residents and a trauma centre for those injured in an earthquake.

Instead, seismic upgrades are typically done during large hospital redevelopments, or when an old hospital is replaced by a new structure, which is built to the latest earthquake code.

Health Minister Terry Lake said the government is spending all it can afford to upgrade and replace hospitals, which has amounted to more than $10 billion since 2001, and another $2.75 billion over the next three years.

“I think most British Columbians are realistic on this, they understand there’s a risk, and people on the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island know that better than anybody,” he said in an interview.

“But they also know there’s a reasonableness and a limitation to how many tax dollars you can put to pulling that risk downward.”

The $1.2 billion replacement for St. Paul’s Hospital will be built to modern seismic codes and include a new emergency room. But it isn’t scheduled to open until 2022.

The new seismic assessments have so far only studied one-third of the area’s 208 health buildings, but has concentrated first on some of the oldest sites.

The data so far shows 51 per cent of structural blocks assessed so far inside health care buildings are at high risk. But the figure rises to 63 per cent at hospital sites. (Structural block may refer to an entire buildings or a structurally independent section of a large building.)

The Lower Mainland’s health authorities hired the structural engineering firm to update 15-year-old seismic reports.

“We haven’t (assessed) all of the blocks,” said Paul Becker, the chief facilities operating officer for the authorities’ shared Lower Mainland Facilities Management team. “That’s a funding issue.”

The structural data is being entered into a new earthquake database, which for the first time could give the region’s decision-makers a real-time look at the earthquake readiness of hospitals, as well as the cost to bring old buildings up to modern seismic codes.

The health authorities are this month expected to debate a 10-year earthquake master plan, which would have them spend up to $15 million to finish the seismic assessments, as well as provide more detailed engineering and cost estimates to strengthen specific buildings.

The final plan includes assessing non-structural hazards, like falling medical equipment or fragile utility lines for gas, electricity and water. If those items break, it could leave a hospital unable to operate even if its structure survives the initial tremors.

“There is no discreet line item at the health authority level for seismic (repairs) but that’s what the 10-year plan would do,” said Becker. “We’d say here’s the plan, here’s the funding, and let’s create line items we’d be accountable for.”

Opposition NDP leader John Horgan said the government needs a program and plan in place to ensure hospital safety in an earthquake.

“This strikes me as an area where (government) has been negligent at best, and potentially putting people at risk,” he said. “When a shaker comes, where are we going to take those injured and in distress? You want to take them to your acute care facilities and they too could be in rubble. That should be a major concern.”

Lake said government has spent five times more money on hospitals than schools since 2001, even without a dedicated seismic program for health care buildings.

The government has increasingly wrestled with whether it’s worth spending millions on seismic upgrades to aging hospitals, only to be left with old buildings that don’t meet modern medical needs, aren’t designed to infection-control standards, lack private rooms and are still beset by expensive problems in ventilation, electrical, plumbing and elevator services.

Increasingly, the government has opted to build new hospitals.

“The detailed analysis of risk would have to be put into the equation with the cost of mitigation, versus using those capital dollars towards a new investment,” said Lake.

Lake said numerous new hospital projects are in the works, including replacing the 1940s-era Shaughnessy building at B.C. Women’s hospital, $260-million for redevelopment at Royal Columbian Hospital and two new hospitals on North Vancouver Island. That’s in addition to the $512-million patient tower and emergency department at Surrey Memorial Hospital, which opened in 2013, as well as redevelopment at Abbotsford Regional Hospital.

Horgan called on the government to follow California’s lead. State law requires California hospitals to be structurally upgraded to withstand a strong earthquake by 2020.

“The intention was ultimately that hospitals should withstand an earthquake and remain operational after an earthquake,” said Eric Reslock, an assistant director in California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.

In addition, California health facilities have until 2030 to ensure their medical equipment and non-structural hazards are safety-proofed to be operational after an earthquake.

California’s laws were created in response to a damaging earthquake in 1971, and then updated after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which killed 72 people and injured more than 11,000 during magnitude 6.7 tremors.

But the California state government didn’t put any money into paying for the seismic work. Instead, local counties, primarily responsible for buildings, had to fundraise or turn to taxpayers for billions in repairs. The state also has private hospitals that had to find the money themselves.

Currently, 90 per cent of California’s 3,000 acute-care buildings are considered earthquake safe, and the public has access to a seismic inspection database for all acute care facilities.

Lake rejected the California method.

“Our capital plan is very aggressive, so to go beyond what we’re doing, fiscally would be very difficult to sustain,” he said. “You could put in all the laws you want, but where’s the money going to come from?”

B.C.’s answer doesn’t necessarily involve massive funding to earthquake proof all the existing buildings, said Becker, who is leading the charge for the revitalized seismic program in Lower Mainland health authorities.

“We need to be much more clever than that, and not just throw money at the problem but be clever and intelligent and creative on how we mitigate those risks,” he said.

“So you could do a combination of structural and non-structural.”

Auditor General Carol Bellringer said in a report this week the government should do a better job informing the public about the condition of its physical assets, like hospitals, bridges and highways, and the long-term cost to keep them safe and operational.

Source: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Vancouver+emergency+rooms+likely+crumble+major+quake/11152276/story.html