Episode 1 - Ripples in a Pond

What does it take to become one of the most popular mystery novelists in the world? For Louise Penny, that road wasn't easy, but she got through it with the support of her husband and a lot of humor. When I was like five years into writer's block, and now he's still supporting me, right? He'd stopped asking me how the book was going. He was a little bit like my mother when I reached 35, 36, and wasn't married yet, you know, and she stopped asking. Check out that conversation on bookends with me, Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. This is the sound of a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. This one struck 40 kilometers from the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. The aftershock that followed was devastating. Full floors of staff, so they could be nearly about 200 people in the possibly in the building. The main road is just buildings down, man. I was in my office, and it just absolutely concerted in a dust and debris, and it was just horrific. I could also see a glass building over here, and the glass was just popping in and out. It looked like it was moving about a meter, and then it just absolutely shitted under the road. And we're just worrying about other colleagues, and they're making hoping that they're okay. 185 casualties, billions of dollars, and five years later, that city is still recovering, a process that may take another four or five decades. What happened in New Zealand not only could happen in British Columbia, it will. We know that, and Christchurch may be a best-case scenario for us. So this is your wake-up call. This is Fault Lines. A CBC Vancouver podcast about what will happen when a major earthquake hits the southwest coast of British Columbia Canada, and the Pacific Northwest of the USA. I'm Johanna Wackstaff, and I live in Vancouver. My day job here at CBC is a meteorologist, but I also have a degree in seismology, the study of earthquakes. And I'm going to be your guide through this journey. We are all in this together. I think people tend to focus on the McOne, you know, and I think partly because it happens infrequently. If you're looking at the statistics, there's a one in ten chance that will happen within the next 50 years. You know, I think of those as fairly high odds. If we had a lottery with that kind of probability, you'd probably buy a ticket. I wish I could say that all our schools are safe now, unfortunately not. We'll be looking at quite a bad scenario if that epicenter is close to Vancouver. So we would see damage to our bridges, damages to our roads. The biggest impact is going to be the buildings. And it could also trigger things like liquid faction, definitely in the delta area. It's guaranteed. So we have to think in terms of it is going to happen. It's a disaster and slow motion. Those are just some of the people we'll meet along the way. People who know the risks and choose to live here anyway. People like me. I've always been interested in earthquakes as a little girl growing up in Japan practicing earthquake drills with my class, experiencing my first albeit small earthquake in Tokyo. I've always been drawn to the fact that the earth under our feet is not as steady as it seems. And when I moved out to the west coast to a seismic zone, I actually did my thesis on. I learned pretty quickly that I wasn't the only one who had earthquakes on the brain. I report on every small quake in BC and every large one elsewhere in the world. And when they happen, we wrap up coverage. People ask questions. People say they will get prepared. And then the earth grows quiet again. And so do we. For me, there's no better place to study earthquakes than right here in earthquake country. And it helps that all the action under our feet where the land meets the ocean is what is actually given rise to the mountains and the beauty that makes BC such an appealing place to live. It's why I stay. And in my mind, it was all about managing risk. And I thought I was ready. I've got a kit. I've got a plan. And I assumed our various levels of government were ready as well. But I'm preparing for this program. I've come to understand that's not exactly the case. There are plans. But most are in their infancy. There works in progress. Because until very recently, a devastating earthquake was just too big, too frightening to wrap our collective heads around. No one knew where to start. So even though we've all heard of the big one and our kids practice their drop cover and hold on at school, we've really only just started to have the conversations we should have been having a long time ago. So that's what we're going to do here. We're going to lay out not one but two earthquake scenarios. And we're going to have those conversations as I guide you through what will happen and what you need to do to prepare for yourself, for your family, for your neighbors. We'll start with the big one. This is the one we all know will happen. The one you've heard about. The mega-thrust earthquake, also known here as the Cascadia earthquake. That's the one that caught everyone's attention when that article came out in the New Yorker. Writer Catherine Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for her piece entitled The Really Big One. It was pretty terrifying. If you're anywhere within the tsunami in a nation's zone, it's where the absolutely grave danger exists. You've got to have a way to get out of there or you are very unlikely to survive it. We're absolutely going to lose a lot of the infrastructure you're not able to drive a car or emergency vehicle. They're not going to be able to get to you. We're talking about massive failure of bridges, of highways, of airports. I mean, you name it, hospitals, police stations, fire stations. And the region in many respects is going to be unrighteous, measurable. It's three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon. It's fall. Most of us are at work. The kids are at school, waiting impatiently for the end of the day. When two tectonic plates that have been locked together for 300 years suddenly slip past one another. The epicenter is 200 kilometers off the west coast of southern Washington State and 30 kilometers under the ocean floor. It's here where the energy equivalent of 20,000 nuclear bombs is released into the earth, radiating outwards like ripples and a pond. Rocks give way, releasing centuries of built-up stress, the earth unzips. When it finally stops, just off the west coast of Vancouver Island, a 500 kilometer stretch of the Wanda Fuca oceanic plate has slid under the North American plate, resulting in a 9.1 magnitude earthquake. The first seismic waves from Washington reach our shores almost immediately. The shaking begins, and as the rupture in the earth gets closer, the shaking gets more and more intense, and it doesn't stop for a full five minutes. It's virtually impossible for anyone on Vancouver Island to stay standing. People as far away as Manitoba feel the earth rumble. Graham Taylor is a seismic engineer and a pioneer of the province's school retrofit programs. On a recent walk through a residential neighborhood in Victoria, we stopped outside a house so he could describe what would happen when the big one hits. The sea to shakes would pop off straight away. The horizontal board would become loose very quickly, because each board has just the two nails. So as soon as it starts any racking action, all those nails start to pull out, so it gets softer and softer. The back end of her house would have collapsed. It's got a full six feet, you know, 1.6 meters, 1.8 meters, which I actually thought. So when it falls, the house is going to fall at the back, and everything in the house is going to slide to the back wall. The furniture, everything is going to move. That's where people get killed. They get pinned by their own furniture. Then of course, there are the older buildings. Sean Carby is the senior manager of Protective Services with the Capital Regional District. We took a walk through downtown Victoria. Chinatown system right there, obviously, and a lot of buildings there are heritage buildings and again not designed for seismic resistance. And they're not even particularly tall. I mean, we're talking for five story buildings. For a five story building that then collapses in one direction, that's a 60-70 feet of brick and mortar that can then move across a road that's probably a 30-40 feet across. As you can tell it, you know, it then becomes a passable. And you'll be able to see that if you look at the photos of Christchurch where those roads became a passable. Yeah, the cars get smashed. It just becomes a debris field. As the historic buildings begin to crumble and spill onto the street, people are also headed for the street, but not necessarily to safety as our hazards both inside and out. Here's engineer Graham Taylor again. As soon as the parapet's sought to go and they'll go fairly quickly, then anything that can fail will totally fail. And that's where certain buildings that are very vulnerable. That's where they could potentially collapse. And the biggest issue of all is we have wood frame construction and all our basements are going to collapse. So we could have two to three thousand people killed in Victoria alone. A severe scenario for the Cascadia. Here's what that severe scenario sounded like in Japan in 2011 before the tsunami hit. Hours could be similar, 2000 dead in Victoria alone, and as many as 10,000 across the West Coast to BC. You're listening to fault lines, a CBC Vancouver podcast that looks at what will happen when a massive earthquake hits our coast. I'm Johanna Wagstaff, your tour guide for survival. And we're still exploring our first scenario, a 9.1 megathrust, the big one. Meanwhile in Vancouver, 300 kilometers away from the action under the earth, the shaking is still strong, but it doesn't feel quite the same. Allison Bird is a seismologist with earthquakes Canada. The high frequencyer, you know, that those jiggling waves get filtered out by the earth. And what you end up with is the longer period waves. And first nation's stories of the 1700 earthquake talk about people on the mainland area feeling motion sick. And actually, you know, feeling quite woozy. You do get these weird, long angelations, and it really doesn't feel good. Finally, it stops. The earth is still again. For now. That's when the tsunami warning sirens begin to wail into Fino. Some people know right away. This means to get to higher ground, but where is higher ground? DeFino Mayor Josie Osborne says making sure people know that can be a challenge when so much of the population is transient. The very first thing you should do is simply get to safe ground. So it's not about what building you end up in or near. It's just about the fact that you're out of the inundation zone and that you're not going to be affected by the tsunami immediately. And after that, there needs to be a way for people to understand where to go. If you're staying at a resort on the beach, you're not going to be able to go back there, for example. So we do have an evacuation center downtown, which is our community center. We have an alternate site. The hospital has an alternate site. Everybody's got a backup plan. But really what we need to remember in that those immediate hours right afterwards is that this is about saving your own life first and then second, this is about assisting those who the casualties that need help to survive. Tourists are panicked. The water along Chesterman Beach begins to disappear as it draws back into the ocean. A massive tsunami is coming. Back at the epicenter, a section of crust that was being dragged down suddenly snaps back up. All 500 kilometers of the ruptured zone suddenly punches upwards. And the huge column of water that sits atop the fault line moves with it. The waves traveling at the speed of a jet liner push out across the Pacific Ocean towards the coastline where the water is shallower. Each wave is forced to slow down, compressing it, making it higher. By the time it gets to Tafino, 20 minutes after the shaking begins, the wave is 9 meters high. The wall of water moves inland several kilometers, taking cabins, houses, cars, trees, and anything else in its way with it. When the water finally begins to retreat, those who have managed to escape are still not safe. Here's seismologists, Allison Burt again. It's not just one wave, it's multiple waves and often that first wave is not the highest. A lot of people have lost their lives because they've watched the first wave come in. They've gone down to that height to watch the next one come in and of course the next one's been higher and they've been swept away because these waves are faster than you can run. And also because they can look really innocuous at first. There's some coverage from Japan where it just looks like a little trickle-coming along an inlet. And it can build very quickly, it becomes very fast and threatening. And even if it's low because of the strength behind it, it can really knock you off your feet. So even if it's not, you know, below the height of your knees, it's still dangerous. As president of Ocean Networks Canada, Kate Moran has studied the potential path these waves will take as they wrap around the southern coast of Vancouver Island. She shows me a model, a portal Bernie, on the southern coast of Vancouver Island. You can see the river coming into Port Aberdeen and the town is densely located around it. This tsunami wave is coming in, it's coming in and it's staying there. You're seeing the entire channel in the town completely inundated after six hours after the tsunami. And so that's because of the fact that it is like a trapped wave, a wave comes in, can't get up. Second wave comes in, can't get up. Third wave. So it's that trapping that causes the big inundation in Port Aberdeen. Once they've cleared the island, the tsunami waves spread out to the southern sections of Metro Vancouver. The digs in Richmond were supposed to be high enough to protect against what is now a medium and a half wall of water. But the shaking from the earthquake has damaged some sections and it's high tide. That meter and a half wall of water is now a three meter wall and parts of Richmond are inundated. A scenario that communications chief and public safety officer Ted Townsend says Richmond is ready for. The worst case is that we might get some minor topping of our digs from a tsunami. And one of the things that we've done to deal with that is that we invested in an emergency notification system than the members of the public can sign up to and they can sign up to that to receive emergency notices via text, via email, via phone, even via fax if they will still use that technology. So those who signed up for that alert will know to get to a safe place in Richmond. For others living by the water in the lower mainland, the earthquake itself will be the warning that a tsunami may be coming. But it may not always be that way. Engineers in BC have been developing earthquake early warning systems that send out an alert before the shaking even begins. There are now sensors at a handful of infrastructure projects in a number of schools in the province and soon there'll be some on the ocean floor. Here's how the warning system works. When an earthquake happens, it sends seismic waves out in all directions. The fastest waves, the waves that arrive first, don't shake the ground in a damaging way. In fact, we can't even feel those primary or P waves, but sensors can. And in the lag between those P waves and the arrival of the more damaging shear waves or S waves, there's enough time to get a warning out. The further away you are from the epicenter, the more time you have. In the case of the megathrust off the coast, we could have more than a minute's notice. But in a crustal earthquake under the city, and we'll talk about those crustal earthquakes shortly, it may only be 15 or 20 seconds. Here's Kate Moran again from Ocean Networks Canada. It's possible to actually provide an alert for a crustal if it's distant enough and you have enough sensors to provide that alert, but it's not guaranteed. But we know from the megathrust earthquake that we can, this technically feasible, we put the sensors dense enough, we get sensors near the subject and fault, we can't provide time for people to prepare, for gas valves to shut off, for elevators to go to the bottom buildings and fire our hall doors to open. All those kinds of things that will protect people's lives and keep infrastructure safe. But how much time is enough time to do that? Somewhere between 30 and 90 seconds, the ground shaking will arrive at any particular location. So that alert in a school would be an alarm, in Translink it would be hopefully an automatic system to slow down trains, in hospitals and alarm system, or announcement to stop surgery. All the lights in the Massey Tunnel and any kind of infrastructure where people are moving vehicles that could be at risk, all the lights go red. All those things could happen within that time frame. It's a promising advancement in earthquake preparedness, but on its own, it's not enough. Carlos Ventura is the director at UBC's earthquake engineering facility. The early warning system is a great tool to help, but that doesn't minimize the risk of a building collapse. It's just minimizing the risk of people there, because at least if you have a warning, you know what to do. So even with alerts in place, once the megathrust hits, it's instant chaos. Buildings and vital infrastructure have collapsed. People are trapped, injured, searching frantically for loved ones, communication systems are down. Children are still at school, separated from their parents, and parents who are now panicked, hoping that the school actually got that seismic upgrade it needed. As night falls on the west coast, those who have survived the big one are just beginning to understand the enormity of what's happened. And the aftershocks haven't even begun. I'm Johanna Wagstaff. This is Fault Lines, a CBC Vancouver podcast, two scenarios, one coast, and the impact of a major earthquake. The big one, the megathrust, will be devastating. But there's an equally devastating earthquake scenario that gets very little attention. I mentioned it earlier. The shallow, crustal earthquake, our second very likely scenario. And for those of us who live in the major cities of the Pacific Northwest, this is the one we should be most worried about. Yes, the one that many haven't even heard about. Let's rewind. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is still locked out there in the Pacific Ocean. Plates are stuck and stress is building up. The North American Plate is feeling some of that stress, as the oceanic plate tries to move underneath it, like a tissue being crumpled in your hand, dozens of fault lines, cracks under the surface of the earth, also feel pressure build up. And any one of those many fault lines that sits right under Victoria, or Vancouver, or Seattle, could rupture at any minute. So let's imagine that one of them does go. It's the middle of the night, 1 a.m., it's March, and it's raining. A fault line just 10 kilometers beneath the surface of the Sandwich inlet, suddenly ruptures with a magnitude 7 earthquake. Because it's so shallow and so close to major cities, the seismic waves don't have to travel very far, within 15 seconds Vancouver and Victoria feel the shaking. It begins with a jolt, like a truck hitting your house. It's violent, not the rolling motion of a megathrust. It's difficult to stand. But it lasts only 20 seconds. Here again, what it sounded like in Christchurch. Radio New Zealand gave us this recording. 20 seconds. It feels like eternity. The energy released is 1400 times weaker than a 9.1 magnitude, but it's so much closer to our cities. Just 10 kilometers straight up, rather than 300 kilometers to the west, and then 30 kilometers down. The shaking turns sandy sections of Richmond and Victoria to Jello. Runways at YVR are cracked. Airplanes are grounded or diverted. And with all the rain and spring runoff, mudslides have been triggered on the North Shore and Sea to Sky Highway. Dorit Mason is director of North Shore Emergency Management. An earthquake is the ultimate, the penultimate type of emergency, because you will have potentially traffic accidents, landslides, building collapses, flooding potentially, hazardous materials. And it's not just on the North Shore, it would be everywhere in this region. There is no tsunami and no aftershocks, but every single building, all of the infrastructure in Metro Vancouver and the greater capital region, was just put to the test. Perry Adbar is head of UBC's Civil Engineering Department. And let's be clear, in a large earthquake, we will get some buildings collapse. And one of the reasons is we've never had an earthquake. Unlike many other jurisdictions that get earthquakes, and have the same hazard that we have, you know, they've had earthquakes, they've had buildings damaged, they've had buildings collapse. We've not had an earthquake, you know, to cold the herd, if you like, right, to identify the bad ones. So they're all still up. Some people will be trapped in the rubble of those buildings, or injured along the way. Daniel Stevens is director of emergency management for the city of Vancouver. We'll be looking at quite a bad scenario if that epicenter is close to Vancouver, so we can compare that to something like Christchurch, that experience, that type of earthquake, or even lower magnitude than that close to their city center. So we would see damage to our bridges, damages to our roads, telecommunication systems would be damaged, and those parts of it that are up and running will be overloaded initially. There may be fires that break out in some areas, and the biggest impact is going to be the buildings. Buildings are going to be either, some facades will come down, the internal sort of support systems in the buildings, the lights, the fixtures, anything that wasn't bolted back to the book shelves. It's going to be quite a mess in the buildings where people haven't taken steps, or the buildings that haven't been built resolutely. That mess is why some people keep shoes and flashlights under their beds. It's why we practice drills. Because in the moment, unless our muscle memory tells us to drop cover and hold on, we'll be frozen with fear, unable to move, or we'll start to run, putting ourselves in even greater danger. These two earthquake scenarios may be different, but the aftermath is similar. And for those of us that have survived the major event, we may not feel relief. We made it, we're alive. But where are our loved ones? What's happened to my home? We survived, but this journey is just beginning. This is CBC Vancouver's fault lines, a podcast mapping the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. On our next episode, surviving the first 24 hours. It's the high-rise condos, the older ones, particularly where we were. Who can leave the hospital? How can we evacuate the emergency department? If the trains moving on the track, while it happens, we could have a big problem. They can assess the port where they can assess the airports. And if it's not usable, at least we know that and you don't have that other catastrophic event. This honestly looks like we're walking into disaster zone, there are Porto cars, there are flipped vehicles. I feel like I want a movie set. But it's all too real. For more episodes of fault lines, visit cbc.ca/podcasts, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, please be sure to write us a review. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.