A major earthquake would be deadly for Vancouver and devastate privately owned buildings, according to the latest in a long line of warning reports.
The latest effort to reduce the earthquake risk in Vancouver’s privately owned buildings is at its “biggest moment ever,” according to Micah Hilt, the city’s lead seismic policy planner.
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The report found the highest risk is with older brick, wood and concrete buildings in the West End, Downtown Eastside, Chinatown, Strathcona, downtown, Kitsilano, Fairview, and Mount Pleasant neighbourhoods.
“This risk assessment provides us not just the high level findings that confirm things we know from San Francisco or Seattle, but really specific data on the problem — the where, the what, those types of things. That allows us to actually do careful risk reduction planning. I think that’s a major advancement from where we’ve been before,” Hilt said.
Last week, city council unanimously approved that staff start work on a plan to reduce seismic risk in Vancouver based on the latest analysis.
Recommendations are expected to come back to city council by mid-2025, or perhaps as late as the fall, after consultations with groups such as property owners, landlords, tenants and Indigenous people.
It is the latest in a long line of initiatives in the past decades that have so far failed to produce a concrete plan to reduce seismic risk in the 90,000 privately owned buildings in Vancouver.
One of the key steps the city took in 2017 was to hire Hilt, who was a seismic planner in San Francisco.
Instead, Hilt expects recommendations to focus on a plan that will reduce risk gradually, perhaps with the use of risk inventories that will encourage building owners to undertake voluntary upgrades.
In San Francisco, a public inventory of private schools at risk led to a lot of seismic upgrades in those schools, noted Hilt.
City councillors were told last week that there is also the potential to use land-use zoning to encourage the replacement of, for example, older wood apartment buildings with larger concrete buildings with provisions not to displace tenants, as is done in the Broadway corridor redevelopment plan.
Whether there will be any incentives attached to a plan to reduce seismic risk in privately owned buildings has not been determined, and pushing seismic risk reduction further will need help from the province and Ottawa, city staff told city councillors.
Hilt said they hope to get the support of the province and Ottawa in this next stage.
Observers and experts have said a stumbling block to previous risk-reduction programs getting started was the cost to upgrade private buildings.
The latest computer modelling estimates that a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in the Georgia Strait could heavily damage 6,100 buildings in the Vancouver, leading to more than 1,350 deaths and severe injuries.
It would also lead to the estimated displacement of more than one third of city residents and workers for more than three months and result in $17 billion in financial losses.