About this site

My name is Thomas Tartière. I live in downtown Vancouver and volunteer as the chef d’îlot for the French community. If something serious happens in this part of the city, the French consulate’s emergency plan has me as the local point of contact.

Preparing for that role meant reading what has been published about a major earthquake here, and there is a lot of it. The public guidance mostly covers the risk and what to do while the ground is shaking. What happens over the following days, weeks and months is in technical reports: the province, for example, expects disruption to water and wastewater systems “for many months following the event”. [1] Those reports are rarely brought together, and most are written for specialists, not for the general public.

This site tries to fill that gap. It describes, in plain language, what a household would live through in the short, medium and longer term: what happens to the water, power, roads and food supply it relies on, and how long each takes to come back.

This is a personal project, not a publication of the consulate, a municipality or any agency, and nothing on it is an official instruction.

I studied mechanical engineering and work in energy management. Neither gives me expertise in seismic or geotechnical engineering. This site is not engineering work, and nothing on it is a professional opinion. It reports what others have published, and where they disagree or say nothing, it says so.

In November 2015 I went to a talk in Vancouver by Janos Toth (Enginomix Consulting Inc.) on the earthquake vulnerability of British Columbia’s critical infrastructure. [2] He had brought together information from many published sources to give an overall picture, and went through it one system at a time: buildings, schools, hospitals, bridges, the water supply, the power grid. It had a lasting effect on me.

Years later, when my first child was born, that talk was still in the back of my mind, and it is what got me to put together an emergency kit for our family. I would like this site to do the same for other people, and to follow the same approach: start from published work, go through the systems people rely on, and show what losing them would mean.

My goal is an honest picture of what a major earthquake would do to life in the Lower Mainland. Wherever published work exists, I rely on it, and each figure links to its source on the sources page.

The published record has gaps. Some systems have never been assessed publicly, and some studies cover one neighbourhood but not the next. Where that happens, I say so instead of filling the gap with a guess.

I keep the detail light on purpose. What changes how a household prepares is knowing whether something lasts days, weeks or months, and what that would be like to live through. So that is what I focus on. The full documents are linked for anyone who wants them, and How this site works explains my method.

This site was built with generative AI, mainly Anthropic’s Claude (Opus 5.5), in 2026. I decided what to cover, which sources to trust and what went on each page. The AI searched for and summarised published documents, drafted most of the text and wrote most of the code.

Every figure and quotation was then checked against the document it cites, first by a separate AI review pass and then by me. The photographs are real, taken by the people credited under them. None was generated.

AI makes mistakes, and so do I. Every figure links to its source so you can check it. If something looks wrong, please tell me.

If you work in one of the fields this site covers, or something on a page looks wrong to you, please get in touch, even without a source to hand. A correction, a report that fills one of the gaps or a review of a page all help keep the picture accurate. The site is open source, and Contribute explains how to send them.