The West Coast of British Columbia is considered earthquake country. If you’ve lived here for a while, you might already know this, and you might even already have your own earthquake kit! Many major subduction zones run too closeby for us to remain comfortably unprepared. They include…
- The Cascadia Subduction Zone, to our west.
- The Seattle Fault, to our south.
- The South Whidbey Island Fault, to our west.
- The Denali Fault Zone, to our north
Although some of these activity-prone fault lines do not run directly through BC, we are close enough by to be potentially and majorly impacted if an earthquake were to occur. The plates that make up the earth’s crust can move in three ways: they can slide past each other, they can collide, or they can diverge. Along the west coast of Canada, the plates do all three. This is what leads to such significant earthquake activity in our region.
In fact, more than 2500 earthquakes are recorded by seismologists in Western Canada, each year!
In British Columbia, if we were to be hit by an large enough earthquake to trigger a tsunami, we would have no walls to protect ourselves. We may receive a tsunami warning giving us an extra allotment of seconds or minutes to get prepared. But in the midst of an emergency, you need to be able to take action without thinking, or while being unable to think clearly. Your survival instincts need to kick in if you’re going to survive, and the best way to ensure that they’ll kick in is to practice, and get prepared ahead of time.
If you’re not sure where to start with getting prepared for an earthquake, check out some of our previous blog posts on Quake Kit as well as our sister site, Total Prepare. You’ll also want to look through the BC Get Prepared website to help get you started with all of the fundamental earthquake preparedness knowledge and resources that you need.
-Content created by Sophie Wooding – Writer, gardener, cyclist and emergency preparedness enthusiast!