I spent six years quakeproofing my house in anticipation of BC Big One

(illustration of Maclean’s)

For West Coasters, it’s hard to ignore the threat of the Big One – especially in Victoria, the city where I live, which is likely to be at greater risk of earthquake damage than any other Canadian city. Every time an earth-shaking tragedy occurs elsewhere, that danger is brought into sharp focus, because we know that someday it will happen here — and “someday” may not be so far in the future.

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A report commissioned by the City of Victoria in 2017 looked at different types of earthquakes that could shake the city, including two worst-case scenarios: an offshore earthquake, a magnitude 9 earthquake, or a magnitude 7 earthquake, closer to City. . The first is a massive undersea rift that stretches all the way from northern California to the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Scientists know that it produces massive earthquakes every few hundred years. There are records in Aboriginal oral histories of a huge earthquake around 1700, as well as written records from Japan of that year’s “elitium tsunami,” which indicate that Cascadia last erupted 323 years ago. Scientists estimate that the Cascadia subduction zone produces an earthquake every 200 to 800 years, so we’re inside the window, with an estimated 10 percent chance within the next 50 years. Add to that the risk of other tremors, including a crustal earthquake, and there could be a one in three chance that the city will be violently shaken in the next 50 years.

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The city report painted a grim picture of what would happen: Hundreds of buildings could collapse, and thousands more would be damaged beyond repair. The study estimated that the city could lose nearly two-thirds of its entire building stock in any type of earthquake—a civil disaster without parallel in modern Canadian history.

I always assumed the odds of my old house being a survivor of an earthquake like this were slim. The 111-year-old wood-frame home longs for charm but lacks modern seismic innovation. So in 2018, I hired an earthquake engineer. Graham Taylor is an expert in the field, who worked on British Columbia’s seismic renovation effort. (His predictions are as grim as those of the province—it’s estimated that as many as 2,000 people in the Victorian region could be killed in a major earthquake.) Taylor inspected my walls, basement, floor below my house and some other important factors, and confirmed my suspicions: It wasn’t likely. to succeed my house. After a few minutes of jiggling side-to-side, the nails in the old slabs on the basement walls will probably work themselves in, at which point the slabs will fall off the vertical 2-by-4 wall supports that support the house on top of the concrete foundation. Once these slabs fly off, it will take more shaking before the wall studs succumb to the horizontal motion and collapse on the sides, collapsing the top two floors into the basement. It is possible that no one on the top two floors will be crushed, but the house will be destroyed.

Gregor Craigie spent years preparing for a possible earthquake. (photo via Craigie)

Upon hearing this kind of news, Taylor says, some homeowners simply decided to leave. He has seen some people move thousands of kilometers away – because the thought of an earthquake terrified them, and because of unsettling questions about what life is like after the event, when food and shelter are so scarce. But I have a job and a life here, so I decided to make my home stronger.

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In fact, I had already done a fair amount of work in the year prior to hiring Taylor. I installed rebar panels to the junctions between the vertical support beams and the horizontal roof beams in the basement – and the beams simply rest on the uprights, which has been fine over the past century, because the floor hasn’t moved, and the weight of the whole house on top keeps things firmly in place. However, in the event of a major earthquake, basement columns would often shake from the beams that supported them. I also screwed the hot water tank to the wall, so we wouldn’t have a flooded basement—and have a large container full of clean water, even if all the water lines ruptured. I’ve even attached my bookshelves to the walls with steel L-brackets to make sure no one in my family gets knocked out of our home library.

But the basement walls were key to keeping the house steadfast. I could hire a contractor to do the work – but Taylor suggested I could do the work myself to save money. It’s expensive, time consuming, and tedious, but it’s also very easy. With my mortgage not paying itself and my grocery bill getting bigger every month, I took a deep breath and got down to business, starting outside.

The house was covered in old cedar that needed replacing anyway, so I took it out, then proceeded to rip off the old boards underneath, and screw siding on the vertical studs. I found plenty of spiders, mouse droppings, and dust along the way, but following relatively straightforward plans, I methodically installed new three-quarter-inch plywood to the wall studs, where the old boards had been. The new plywood is much stronger, and the plans call for more nails, with a specific nailing pattern. I also cut the plywood in half before nailing it to the wall so it has a spacer built in to absorb some of the side-to-side movement when it starts to vibrate.

A lot of seismic retrofits like this also call for steel nails, to attach the wood frame of the house to the concrete foundation, but Taylor tells me it’s not necessary, and will likely give me a leaky basement because of potential holes and cracks in the old concrete.

All of these engineering fixes are based on real-world observations of how log homes respond to real earthquakes, in California and elsewhere. They are also based on simulations of earthquakes, such as those performed on the giant “vibrating table” earthquake simulator at the University of British Columbia. I visited the simulator once, with Taylor, and watched him shake a large plywood room, the size of a school classroom. It had giant steel plates resting on top of it, and engineers programmed the table to replicate the exact shaking pattern from the deadly 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. When the plywood section was shaken for more than two minutes, the nails holding the plywood to the wall studs barely moved. But a similar simulation with walls like my basement—with narrower boards and fewer nails—showed nails popping under constant vibration, eventually causing the walls to collapse.

It was a vivid reminder of what is not only possible, but guaranteed to eventually hit my home—unless I finish the job in time. But after countless hours on a weekend of prying and measuring and cutting and hammering away, I’m still a quarter done. Life continues to get in the way. The epidemic came first. Then the price of lumber tripled. There’s my regular job, my side work writing a second book—my first book, about unacknowledged earthquake risk in Canada, is published in 2021—and family life. Glancing at the calendar on the fridge as I write this, I see the three kids playing in a water polo tournament this weekend. So overall, I’m about two years behind schedule. Realistically, I hope to finish the basement walls in the fall of 2024.

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And even then, the seismic retrofit will not take place. Next I have to figure out what to do with the old chimney, one on either side of the house, which could become a deadly barrage of bricks in a major earthquake. It has happened before people run out of buildings that they end up standing, only to be killed by a downpour. There’s a strong argument for getting rid of most, if not all, brick stacks in a seismic area, but mine still towers over my old house. Most of the other houses in my neighborhood have similar chimneys, and one day, some of them will definitely collapse.

I’m not happy that I’m behind schedule, but I try to comfort myself. After all, there are so many other things to worry about in life, and money and time are hard to come by. This is probably why thousands of buildings in Victoria, Vancouver and beyond are still at risk like my home – including a lot of publicly owned buildings. Half of vulnerable public schools in British Columbia, for example, have had seismic retrofits, at a cost of more than $2 billion — but that also means that half have not.

And while the chances of a catastrophic earthquake in our lifetime are highest on the West Coast, that’s not the only part of the country at risk. Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City are all in seismic zones that have produced major events in the past. It is full of old, unreinforced and timber-framed buildings, and the newer buildings are no better off, because they were not built in those areas with seismic hazards in mind. The East Coast isn’t entirely safe either; The ocean floor rumbled off Newfoundland again as it did in 1929, when it caused the tsunami on the Burren Peninsula, which devastated the fishing villages of that province, and claimed 28 lives. The truth is, the clock is still ticking for many Canadian communities — and the millions of us who live in active seismic zones had better hope that we still had time to prepare.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://macleans.ca/society/environment/bc-earthquake-proofing-house-retrofit-big-one/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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