Quake

At 9:00 on Saturday night I had a call from a very bleary-sounding Number One Son, calling from Ottawa where it was midnight. "Did you hear about the earthquake?"

I hadn't. I had been putzing around the intertube looking at this and that. It seems a 7.7 earthquake had struck off Haida Gwaii and a tsunami warning was in place for the west side of Vancouver Island, including Tofino of course, and beyond. For the next few hours I kept my eye on the reports, waiting to see what would happen with the tsunami. Despite the fact that I'm not on Facebook (closed up shop there after a very short time), don't twit or tweet or whatever, nonetheless the word was spreading among friends and family - the phone call, a few emails and text messages. After a few hours the tsunami warning was cancelled and off I went to bed but not before I had thought a lot about earthquakes and Tofino, among other things.

Since 2004, I have looked at some of the sea level, beach front places we've stayed at on the island and elsewhere, calling them "tsunami bait". In recent trips in Ucluelet and Tofino this year, I've been very aware of the fact that if a tsunami did hit, as it has in the past, if we didn't get to higher ground in time we'd be toast. On our last trip to Tofino in September I checked out the evacuation route on our way in to town so I'd know where it was - safe ground is a bit of a hike along the two-lane highway past Long Beach. I wondered at the time how the town would be informed and what an evacuation would look like. I even said to the others that we should park outside in front of the condo building rather than underground behind the electric-run gates. Perhaps my imagination is too vivid, I'm sure it is, which I don't consider a bad thing, but I started imagining what it would be like if an earthquake happened at Tofino and you had to hightail it out of there after finding your car in the darkness of a power outage (as it was in Haida Gwai on Saturday night) and getting it out of the garage - all the while chaos reigns and somewhere out there a big wave is headed your way.

I also noticed during that trip, that the vacation rental condo we stayed at had no information about what to do if... No maps, directions or instructions about how to proceed if natural disaster struck - information I would think would be useful to travellers who don't know their way around, or are even aware of what a precarious part of the planet this is. Check out this map - in the past month over a hundred earthquakes have occurred in coastal British Columbia up through Alaska. Not all of course were felt but it is continuous, all around the Pacific Ring of Fire.

And more big ones are to come.
 

I've been reading a book lately called Cascadia's Fault which is a science thriller - but all true. It tells how scientists have over time found out that the Cascadian fault line which stretches along the North American coast from northern California up along Vancouver Island, that they used to think was inactive, is "virtually identical to the tectonic time bomb that decimated Japan in 2011, and when Cascadia's fault ruptures, it will generate the same kind of earthquake, at magnitude 9 or higher."  It is this type of fault that will cause a huge tsunami, unlike Saturday's which is on a different fault line, the Queen Charlotte Fault and generated a sideward movement of the plates which doesn't cause the big tsunamis an upward thrusting plate movement does.

The author, Jerry Thompson, has been on the earthquake story for 25 years and is brilliant at explaining the science and following the story of the earthquake scientists as they puzzled out the truth about the Cascadia subduction zone. The last big one was January 26th, 1700 (the story of how they figured out that particular date is a good read in itself) and according to the people who get paid to know these things, another one is coming, bigger than anyone has prepared for (or built schools and hospitals to withstand). Certainly the ordinary Joe Blow citizen (or another JB I could mention) is not at all prepared for natural disaster.  They know they should be, but they're not. And I'm sure, most aren't even aware they're living on a timebomb.

Back to Saturday night's Haida Gwaii earthquake. A couple of weeks ago we were at Thanksgiving dinner at our neighbor's house across the street where I met her grandson, a commercial diver. He  was about to leave for a couple of months work up in Haida Gwaii, harvesting geoducks (pronounced 'gooey duck', a species of large clam) for export to Asia. As it turns out, shortly after he started work up there one of the divers on the project died on the job. Not only that, the young man was involved in the rescue and performed CPR on the man, to no avail. I can only imagine how he must be feeling. Now this earthquake has literally rocked their boat. I think it's time for him to come home.

While the scientists know that this part of the Ring of Fire is due for a big one, there is still no way to predict exactly when, which makes the recent criminal conviction of 6 earthquake scientists in Italy particularly bizarre. Convicted of manslaughter, last week they were sentenced to 6 years in prison for failing to warn the public prior to the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009 which destroyed the town and killed 300 people. Other Italian scientists are now saying "take this job and shove it". There is some precedent for this trial and conviction it seems. In 1633 Galileo was tried by the Vatican for claiming the earth revolved around the sun. How far we've come. Not.