Draft. Content under review.
Lower Mainland, British Columbia
The shaking lasts minutes. Here is what fails, and why the outages can last weeks or months.
What happens after the shaking?
A household gets through those weeks on what it already has at home.
Every system comes back on its own schedule
Start with the one you depend on most.
Why this site exists
My name is Thomas Tartière. I live in downtown Vancouver, and in the French consulate’s emergency plan I am the volunteer contact for the French community in this part of the city. Preparing for that meant reading what has been published about a major earthquake here. Public guidance mostly covers the risk and what to do while the ground is shaking. What happens over the following weeks and months is in technical reports written for specialists.
In 2015 I heard Janos Toth go through the earthquake vulnerability of British Columbia’s infrastructure one system at a time. Years later, when my first child was born, that talk is what got me to put together an emergency kit. This site takes the same approach, using published documents, most of them written by governments, utilities and the engineers they hire.
About this site has the rest of the story, How this site works explains the method, the sources page lists every document, and contribute explains how to report an error.
Start with food and water
- British Columbia asks every household to keep at least two weeks of emergency supplies. Most households in the region have not put together a kit of any size.
- You do not need to assemble everything at once. Check what you already have, then add water and food that keeps. The preparation guide shows how much to keep and what to add next.
Sources on this page
Numbered in the order they are cited. Each entry links back to where it is used.
- [1]ReportEarthquake Vulnerability of BC's Critical InfrastructureJanos Toth (Enginomix Consulting Inc.) · 2015Open the document ↗
- [2]ReportEarthquake and Tsunami Preparedness GuidePreparedBC / EMCR, Province of BC · 2024Open the document ↗
- [3]ReportEmergency preparedness pollResearch Co. · 2021Open the document ↗