John Halldorson knows the best way to keep friends and family safe after an earthquake is to prepare communities for disasters beforehand.
As director for the Dunbar Earthquake and Emergency Preparedness Group, Halldorson works with his community to build resilience through emergency preparedness.
Halldorson joined Dunbar’s emergency preparedness group in 2013 because he wanted to give back to his community and put the skills he learned in the Canadian Army Reserves to work.
He served in the Canadian Army Reserves for 43 years and in the last few years of his service he taught a Light Urban Search and Rescue course at the Canadian Forces base in Esquimalt.
Halldorson said the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, showed neighbourhoods that prepared before the disaster were more resilient, and endured less “emotional toll” than those where neighbours were unfamiliar with each other.
“It frees up a lot of stress within people because you … have people you can count on and people you can trust,” said Halldorson.
One resource that the group’s website provides is “Map Your Neighbourhood,” an 11-segment video program guiding neighbourhoods on how to best prepare for disasters by forming community groups. The videos include information on how to identify neighbourhood hazards, pick a home to serve as an emergency care centre and establish a gathering site to meet at after a disaster.
Forming community groups can help you get to know your neighbours better, so you already have an established bond when a disaster, like an earthquake, occurs.
Halldorson said that Vancouver lags behind other cities when it comes to emergency preparedness. Seattle, which is about the same size as Vancouver, has 142 community disaster support hubs where people can go in case of emergencies. Vancouver has only 25.
Halldorson said that Vancouver should take a cue from the Comox Valley Regional District, which has municipal employees facilitate meetings in order to get community groups started.
Currently, the responsibility is on residents to begin forming their own groups, like Halldorson’s in Dunbar.
“People need to connect with their neighbours before facing any sort of an emergency or disaster,” said Jackie Kloosterboer, emergency program manager for the City of Pitt Meadows. “If we were to have an earthquake here, our first [response] services are going to be overwhelmed.
“If neighbours can get together and have a plan … that's going to make a world of difference.”
Personally knowing members of your community will help maintain accurate headcounts and determine who might have the best skills to administer first-aid, run search-and-rescue operations or clear debris from roads to allow access to emergency response crews.
Community resilience “begins with the individual,” said Kloosterboer.
“If you and your family are prepared, you're going to be much better [prepared] to help people [who] may need some extra support,” said Kloosterboer.
“Once the individual is prepared, they can start preparing with their community, and that is really going to be something you're glad you did when an emergency or disaster happens.”
One of the first steps in preparing for disasters is acknowledging that they can happen at any time.
Halldorson says some people don’t take the risk of earthquakes seriously, thinking they can ignore it. He says for others it gets too overwhelming for them to plan at all.
But you can always start small. “A hard hat, some leather gloves and shoes under your bed is a good start,” he said.
Halldorson provides a 48-week preparedness guide on his group’s website, going step-by-step through acquiring earthquake preparedness resources. This includes gathering necessities like flashlights, childcare essentials, and enough non-perishable food and medication to survive if forced into extended isolation.
B.C. experiences several thousand earthquakes a year, but earthquakes strong enough to cause severe damage can be centuries apart.
“There is no earthquake season,” said Sheri Molnar, lead researcher for a Metro Vancouver seismic risk mapping project. “We know that very large earthquakes have happened in the past, the last one in the year 1700. First Nations oral history says that there were canoes, trees, and entire villages that were lost.
“It's just that it hasn't happened in our lifetime,” Molnar said.
Backgrounder
The facts about liquefaction
When people in B.C. worry about damage from “The Big One,” they usually imagine buildings being torn apart by shaking. But there is another possibility: The ground could liquefy beneath them.
This phenomenon is called liquefaction and could cause buildings to sink into the ground.
On June 16, 1964, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake liquefied the ground beneath apartment buildings in Niigata, Japan, causing them to fall over on to their sides.
“People actually evacuated by walking out of their windows and down the front of the building,” said Alison Bird, a seismologist for National Resources Canada.
This kind of damage to cities was also seen during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the United States.
“The ground behaves like a liquid during earthquake shaking,” said Sheri Molnar, the lead researcher for Metro Vancouver's seismic hazard mapping project.
She said the tiny gaps between grains of soil can be filled with groundwater. Although the ground may seem stable, if shaking occurs, the liquid between the grains can be pushed upwards. This causes the soil to lose its structure, making the individual grains of soil flow like water.
Molnar’s project identified areas along the Fraser River at high risk for this hazard, including Delta, Richmond and the City of Pitt Meadows.
However, Molnar said developers have known about the risk of liquefaction for years and take steps to prevent it.
By pre-loading, or densely compacting the soil, before construction, developers can mitigate the natural hazards that cause liquefaction.
If you’ve passed by construction sites with large piles of dirt that don’t seem to be serving any purpose, they might actually be preparing the earth to give buildings a safer ground to stand on.
This story was written by a student in Kwantlen Polytechnic University's Journalism program as part of a partnership between KPU and Black Press Media.
