Port, airport and ferry terminals

Vancouver International Airport sits on Sea Island, in the mouth of the Fraser. Everything that drives to it crosses a bridge.

Modelling of a magnitude 9 megathrust, run for the insurance industry in 2013, expects road access to the airport to be cut off during the first few critical days after the earthquake, because all of the bridges leading to it are damaged. The Arthur Laing Bridge, the main connection between the airport and the city, is expected to suffer moderate damage, may need to be closed for a few days for inspection and initial repair, and may take a few weeks to restore fully. The Canada Line rail service to the airport is likely to be disrupted as well. [1] Those bridges are the same story as every other crossing in the region, which is transportation.

Runways may also be damaged. Sea Island is at moderate risk of liquefaction, saturated soil losing its strength and behaving like a liquid while the ground shakes, and that is the likely source of damage to the runways. Areas of tarmac are expected to be moderately damaged, with minor settlement or heaving of the surface, and some sections of runway may be out of service for a few days. [1]

Terminals, towers and hangars are expected to sustain “slight to moderate damage”, and some masonry structures may take a few months to restore. Airport infrastructure loss across the region is put at more than $300 million. [1]

Vancouver Harbour comes out at slight damage: minor ground settlement, minor cracks in the piles, cracks on the wharf surface. Unanchored cranes may derail or go out of alignment and need minor repair before working again; anchored equipment is expected to stay functional. [1]

The ports near Richmond, Delta and Surrey come out at moderate damage, from liquefaction: considerable settlement and cracking of piles, notable derailment of cranes, and wall cracking in port buildings. Annacis Island and North Delta are where the liquefaction damage is particularly notable. [1]

One damage grade separates them, and what it grades is the ground, not the terminals. Service in some Vancouver-area ports may be disrupted for one to two weeks. [1] Approximately $647 million a day in cargo moves through the Port of Vancouver. [2] A container crane is an electric machine, so a terminal that has realigned its cranes is still waiting on electricity.

The harbour’s better grade belongs to a regional model, and it does not clear every facility on that shoreline. A geotechnical memorandum filed with the port authority for Seaspan’s Vancouver Shipyards, on the north shore of Burrard Inlet, finds the site underlain by loose sands prone to liquefaction and to large displacements in earthquakes with return periods below those current building codes recommend. [3] On what stands there now:

That is an engineer reporting what the owner understands, not an inspection finding, and it covers one industrial boat basin, not the harbour.

A retrospective of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, records that the port, “Japan’s leading container shipping port, was heavily damaged and repairs took almost a year to complete”. It also records that while the city’s economy had largely recovered by 1999, “one notable exception is the Port of Kobe which permanently lost container shipping business to other Asian ports”. [4] Kobe is an illustration, and it forecasts nothing here.

BC Ferries’ renewal program at Horseshoe Bay includes improving seismic safety across all three berths. [5] Horseshoe Bay sits on rock at the mouth of Howe Sound; Tsawwassen sits on the Fraser delta.

The one Lower Mainland ferry facility whose operator says in writing that it falls short is not a terminal. In a regulatory filing, BC Ferries describes its Fleet Maintenance Unit in Richmond, where the fleet is serviced, as having buildings “with a wide range of structural, seismic and hazardous-material deficiencies” and as “a facility site that does not meet current seismic codes and is susceptible to inundation during future sea level rise”. [6] That is a yard, not a berth. It is on the delta, and it is where the vessels get fixed.

None of the figures above comes from anyone inspecting a wharf, a crane or a runway. They are the output of a catastrophe model, a computer simulation insurers use to estimate what an event would cost, which AIR Worldwide ran in 2013 for the Insurance Bureau of Canada, against the infrastructure as it stood then. [1] No operator, regulator or engineer has published an assessment of the terminals, container cranes, pile-supported wharves or runways that are in use.

The one local marine facility with a published federal seismic review is the one that has not been built. Natural Resources Canada reviewed the seismic design of Roberts Bank Terminal 2 and published its review. [7] The review panel for the same project listed the mechanism: seismic activity could affect it through “shaking damage of buildings, cranes, wharves and the causeway overpass”, including “loss of main road access to the terminal due to failure of the existing causeway”. [8] The way in is the weak point there too.

A consulting engineer’s curriculum vitae, filed with that same panel, records seismic and liquefaction assessment work on the Deltaport Berth 3 expansion. [9] The findings were not published.

What this page says about the megathrust rests on that one study, and the study modelled the magnitude 9 megathrust and nothing else. [1] What the port, the airport and the ferry terminals would face in a shallow crustal earthquake close to the city has not been published by anyone. That gap in the public record says nothing about whether the nearer earthquake would be gentler.

The province’s crustal planning scenario does name two of them, as exposure and not as damage: “Liquefaction of roadways in Richmond and Delta may make driving difficult, which may compound impacts to Vancouver International Airport and Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal.” [2] That says the roads to both run over ground that can liquefy. It says nothing about either facility, and nothing about how long either would be out.