Saturday, April 28, 2012

Four Million Fears, BC

 

 

# 6303

 

 

One of the recurring themes in this blog is that disasters can strike anytime, and just about anywhere. For most people, that remains an abstract concept and hard to accept possibility.

 

Which is why it is useful to identify local hazards and point them out to the residents. Here in Florida, talk of hurricane preparedness begins every year several weeks before the season starts.

 

Fellow blogger Crawford Kilian (aka Crof) has a nice feature in The Tyee today, that looks at five disasters that – given enough time – are likely to impact the roughly four million residents of British Columbia.

 

 

Five Disasters to Befall BC

TYEE LIST #12: Earthquakes, pandemics, solar flares; a calamitous pall hangs over our province.

By Crawford Kilian, Today, TheTyee.ca

Natural disasters are exciting when they happen to other people, but we'd rather not think about undergoing them ourselves. As Woody Allen famously observed, "I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens."

Still, we should make our wills even when we're in our prime, and we should bear in mind that some events are so extensive that we will indeed be there when they happen. So let us consider five certain disasters B.C. will face at some point in the future.

(Continue . . . )

 

 

As always, Crof provides an interesting and informative read.

 

As if to drive home the point, in the overnight hours the island of Vancouver has experienced no fewer than three  4.0+ magnitude quakes.  Not enough to do any real damage – but a not so gentle reminder that millions of us stand on shaky ground.

image

 

For another take on all of this - last year in Just A Matter Of Time - I took a long look at the devastating potential of a Vancouver earthquake – tsunami combination.