The person in charge of overseeing the local response to disasters on the North Shore was in the optometrist’s chair at 1:26 p.m., Friday when the earth began to shake.
A 4.7 magnitude earthquake struck about a kilometre below the surface northeast of Sechelt.
“My phone became very active, and I knew that I needed to respond to a few things, so I just politely ended the eye appointment, and we stood up the North Shore response structure,” said Emily Dicken, North Shore Emergency Management director.
As the shaking was underway, Alertable – the smartphone app that NSEM uses for public safety notifications – “did its job and activated right away,” Dicken said.
About two minutes later, inside North Shore Emergency Management’s office at the North Vancouver RCMP detachment, data was coming in from a series of seismic sensors placed on public buildings confirming that a quake had indeed happened but that the shaking likely wasn’t violent enough to have damaged infrastructure.
The next order of businesses was a conference call with all three North Shore municipalities and both First Nations to see that the quake hadn’t triggered any landslides, fires or other “secondary hazards” that often follow a seismic event, and confirmation with the Ministry of Transportation and Transit that the North Shore’s major bridges were unscathed.
BC Ferries briefly evacuated the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal to allow teams do inspect for damage.
Within about two hours, Dicken said NSEM was ready to stand down.
“At the time, it was decided that there was no impact to the North Shore, other than an experience that probably triggered a lot of people,” she said.
Did you feel it?
Although it wasn’t ‘the big one,’ it surely startled a lot of people, said North Vancouver geophysicist and disaster researcher Mika McKinnon.
“It’s easy to forget that we live in earthquake zones in Vancouver. We don’t feel them very often. This is the biggest earthquake we’ve felt in decades,” she said.
How people felt the quake depended largely on what kind of building they were in and what kind of soil or bedrock it is built on. McKinnon, who was standing in line at a Marine Drive grocery store when quake struck, didn’t feel the primary “jolt” that came at the beginning but felt the secondary waves roll through after.
“For me, it felt a lot like being on the ocean,” she said.
Aliya Hussein was working in North Vancouver when she felt it.
“The whole building where I work was shaking. I thought my brain was playing tricks on me until my co-worker said she felt it too,” she said. “I was not too scared, but a little startled.”
North Vancouver resident Kathy Coles said she was feeling a little bit more alarmed after feeling a second shake.
“It shuddered once and I thought, ‘Oh my God, what was that! Did a truck hit this building? And then after the second shudder, I knew it was an earthquake,” she said. “I have a lamp on a table that was shaking back and forth and I’m on the third floor. It was quite scary.”
Earthquake preparedness
There’s nothing like a small quake to get people motivated to prepare for a much larger one, both McKinnon and Dicken said. When it comes to assembling a disaster kit and putting together emergency plans, NSEM directs everyone to PreparedBC, which itemizes the supplies everyone should have stockpiled to shelter in place for at least 72 hours (though a week is better) and tips on how to reach family members in the moments after a disaster.
McKinnon said people tend to have a case of “paralysis” when it comes to confronting the frightening risks we face, but she added everything can be done in small, manageable steps, and you’ll feel less anxious when it’s done.
“If we have a big earthquake, it’s going to be severe shaking a minute or several minutes. It’ll be a lot,” she said. “This is a chance to check on how you responded [to Friday's quake], and if you feel ready. If this were a bigger earthquake, do you feel like you had a plan or know what to do?”
McKinnon recommends sleeping with a pair of shoes under the bed, because a larger quake will leave the exit routes potentially strewn with debris and broken glass.
The event also provided a rare opportunity for scientists to better understand what’s happening beneath the surface of the earth and how we can be more prepared for the next one. For that, McKinnon urges everyone to fill out a survey for Earthquakes Canada at earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca.
“Can we understand how did our building codes react to that earthquake? Are there any little pockets of bedrock we didn’t know about, or any pockets of geologic goop we didn’t know about?” she said. “It’s not a scary earthquake, because people didn’t get hurt and nothing was damaged so we can focus in on the science.”
-With files from Alanna Kelly and Elana Shepert
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