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QuakeImpact

Corrections, sources and local knowledge

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Send a correction, a relevant document or a review from your field. If something looks wrong, it is worth reporting even if you do not have a source at hand.

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How to contribute

Email contact@quakeimpact.ca, or open an issue on the public repository.

The readers most likely to catch what is wrong here work in the fields this site covers: seismology and geotechnical engineering, water and sewer, power, gas, telecommunications, transport, fuel and food supply, housing, health care and emergency management.

The fastest thing to act on is one line saying which claim is wrong, and a document with an author and a date behind it. A pointer to a report you know exists but cannot place saves days on its own. So does a read from the field with no document at all. That becomes a lead to follow. A claim reaches the site only when a reader can check it.

Claims need published evidence before they reach the site. This project does not produce new calculations, and figures from past earthquakes elsewhere are not applied to the Lower Mainland. The 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, can show how a system fails, but not how long a local outage would last.

Three documents we are looking for

How long the water would take to come back. Metro Vancouver’s assessment of its own water system was released with about two thirds of its roughly 300 pages blacked out, including the two pieces a restoration estimate would be built from: the number of leaks and breaks per main, and the damage estimates for 21 water storage facilities. The governing drinking water plan carries no restoration estimate either.

What the port, the airport and the ferry terminals face in the nearer earthquake. The one study that assesses them modelled the magnitude 9.0 megathrust and no shallow crustal earthquake. Nobody has looked at the closer event, as far as this site can tell.

What happens to power outside downtown Vancouver. BC Hydro told its regulator that a large earthquake could leave up to two thirds of downtown customers without power for several weeks. Nothing equivalent has been published for Surrey, Richmond or the North Shore.

If one of those has been answered somewhere and this site has missed it, that is the document to send.

Sources on this page

Numbered in the order they are cited. Each entry links back to where it is used.

  1. [1]ReportRegional Water Supply System Lifeline Study — Seismic Vulnerability AssessmentMetro Vancouver · 2022Open the document ↗
  2. [2]ReportDrinking Water Management Plan 2026Metro Vancouver · 2026Open the document ↗
  3. [3]ReportStudy of Impact and the Insurance and Economic Cost of a Major Earthquake in British Columbia and Ontario/QuébecInsurance Bureau of Canada / AIR Worldwide · 2013Open the document ↗
  4. [4]ReportWest End Substation Project, Initial Application to the BCUC (CPCN), §2.2.1 Seismic Concerns and fn. 2BC Hydro / BCUC · 2025Open the document ↗