Billions in damage, thousands of injuries: Report maps out Vancouver earthquake risks

A staff report headed to Vancouver city council next week has provided a snapshot of just how devastating a large earthquake could be to the city.

The report looks at seismic risks to privately-owned buildings in the city in the case of a large, magnitude 7.2 earthquake.

It found that a quake of that magnitude could damage more than 6,100 buildings, displace a third of residents and workers and cause up to $17 billion in damage.

A severe earthquake could also cause 1,350 severe injuries and fatalities, it found.

Vancouver City Councillor Pete Fry described the report’s contents as “sobering.”

But he said there are no quick fixes to the problem either.

“To meaningfully address all of the risk will take a lot of money and a lot of time, so it does suggest the next steps will be more of an incremental approach,” Fry said.

“Obviously private property rights will prevail in many cases, we can’t force a lot of these changes — and even if we could, a lot of it would be so prohibitively expensive it would create other kinds of hardship.”

The report found six Vancouver neighbourhoods — home to much of the city’s affordable housing — accounted for 65 per cent of the citywide risk. They include the West End, Downtown Eastside, downtown, Kitsilano, Fairview and Mount Pleasant.

It also identified five building types, many built before 1990, which accounted for 80 per cent of the risk, including concrete high-rise apartments and commercial buildings, residential and commercial buildings made from unreinforced masonry and wood-frame multi-unit residential buildings.

The report also highlighted that in the event of a serious earthquake, entire neighbourhoods in some of the densest parts of the city may need to be cordoned off for long periods of time due to risk of collapse, and that major streets could also face blockages.

It calls on the city to develop a comprehensive seismic risk reduction strategy for 2025.

“We have to take it on in little bites, there’s no way we can do this anytime soon or quickly, but we do have to move towards that,” Fry said, adding that shoring up the city’s riskiest areas will require help from the provincial and federal governments.

“Certainly a lot of these buildings will be reaching the end of their natural life and will get replaced in due time, we just don’t have the resources to do that on a wholesale level.”

Shaharia Alam, a professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, said the city had done a good job at identifying its most vulnerable buildings.

But he said addressing the problem will be a massive undertaking, and will require significant funding from senior levels of government, and incentives for property owners.

“With limited funding, you need to identify the most critical infrastructure that are most vulnerable, and address those,” he said,

But he said officials can also get a lot of mileage from educating owners and construction workers to empower them to do smaller things that mitigate risk.

Alam suggested the government fund training workshops on those types of upgrades.

“It is a big undertaking, so if we can even take those small steps then that can actually significantly help the whole building inventory and reduce the risk of building failures and save lives,” he said.

The report recommends the city prioritize the highest-risk building types and neighbourhoods for retrofitting and upgrades.

It also calls on the city to look at incentives and policy changes that could help building owners upgrade their properties while educating the public and creating programs to support voluntary upgrades.

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