Taking advantage of his day off on Tuesday, Brian Gray muted his social media and walked for hours along the trail above Tonquin Beach in Tofino, B.C. By the time he got home, it was 9 p.m., and he’d completely missed any news about the tsunami advisory hours earlier.
He returned to work for his opening shift at Rhino Coffee House on Campbell Street find a noticeable split in the way customers and colleagues were debriefing: nonchalant locals talking about the tsunami news “like it was the hockey game last night,” while deeply concerned visitors looked for reassurance the risk was truly gone.
Gray, 31, says he reassured a colleague from Denmark who was in tears.
“There’s definitely a divide and reaction between people who aren’t from Tofino and people who are out of town,” said Gray, who moved to the surf town from Nova Scotia five years ago. “Seems to be the farther you are away from here, the more worried you are about the earthquake.”
Emergency officials in B.C. issued a tsunami advisory for parks of the B.C. coast on Tuesday after a major 8.8-magnitude earthquake east of Russia. In the end, only small waves lapped at the edge of Vancouver Island’s beaches and the notice was cancelled early Wednesday.
The notice came as another good practice run for locals who know the drill, but was an unnerving experience for visitors reading messages like that for the first time.
‘Not this again’
It’s not that locals don’t take earthquake and tsunami risks seriously — they’re well aware a major earthquake from the Cascadia Subduction Zone would be catastrophic. They’ve just practiced.
“The local girls who grew up here were saying, ‘We’ve evacuated before, we’ve done the drills, and everyone’s like literally run for their lives before,” said Gray.
A new study of the Cascadia subduction zone from California to Vancouver Island reveals the smoother, flatter fault line off the B.C. coast that will one day cause a violent, extremely damaging earthquake and massive tsunami.
Living in an off-grid home just a metre above sea level, Marcie Callewaert-John has long been prepared in case she needs to grab her dogs and hike up to higher ground in a hurry. She said she and her neighbours near Tofino “weren’t too concerned” Tuesday, having just brushed up on their plans after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake off the southern tip of Alaska in mid-July.
“I was like, ‘Not this again,'” Callewaert-John told CBC’s All Points West of the second tsunami advisory in as many weeks.
“One neighbour had no plans to change anything and was concerned about nothing. They were going straight to bed at 9:00 [p.m.] as usual,” she continued. “Another was already in the process of hiking up to a cabin at a higher location. They are a little more exposed and just wanted to play it safe and that’s totally understandable.”
Beachfront hotels were also fresh off a practice run. Staff at Crystal Cove Beach Resort were ready Tuesday after evacuating 425 people in 11 minutes from their Ponsford Beach site after the Alaskan earthquake, though it wasn’t necessary in the end.
“We’re lucky that that’s what the end result was last night. It was really nothing,” general manager J.J. Belanger said Wednesday. “But good practice, again, when you’ve got a full resort and a full community.”
Visitors to the area were left uneasy, unsure what the term “advisory” meant or what they should do. One couple on their honeymoon from England said they never got an emergency alert because their cellphone data was switched off to avoid roaming fees.
They woke up around 5:30 a.m. and read about the hours-old advisory the news.
“It was pretty scary, especially because where we’re staying is right on the water. There’s signs along the road talking about a tsunami but I’ve never really thought about it being an issue here,” said Kasia Weir, speaking alongside her new husband on Wednesday.
“Then suddenly you wake up and you’re like, ‘Oh, there could’ve been something really serious that happened.'”
Earth’s tectonic plates shift slowly — about nine centimetres per year, slightly faster than fingernails grow. This movement can trigger powerful earthquakes. Seismologist John Cassidy explains the science behind earthquakes and why they can lead to tsunamis.
Seismologists and politicians characterized the advisory on Tuesday as another reminder for British Columbians to always be prepared for “The Big One,” especially if they’re exposed on the west side of Vancouver Island or up the coast of the mainland.
“We can always do more in terms of public education,” said Brent Ward, co-director of the Centre for Natural Hazards Research. “But we do kind of worry about fatigue if there’s a lot of warnings and nothing much happens, then when a real one happens, it can be devastating.”
Speaking in an interview after wrapping his shift on Wednesday, Gray said he missed the District of Tofino’s Voyent Alerts on Tuesday because he hadn’t had the chance re-register after switching to a new phone number three weeks ago.
He promptly signed himself back up after last night.
“I would never want to miss an alert again,” Gray said.
In the CBC Vancouver podcast Fault Lines, seismologist Johanna Wagstaffe takes listeners through two disastrous scenarios so they can prepare themselves, their families and their neighbours in the event of an earthquake. Download Fault Lines on CBC Listen, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
