(Above: Damage to the classroom of Courtenay Elementary School 1946 - in a magnitude 7.3 earthquake. Photo: BC Archives)
Help Us Help All B.C. Children
Saturday February 27, 2010: Two major earthquakes in the past few months serve to remind parents of B.C. school children that we too live in a seismically active zone. What many parents new to the school system may be unaware is that hundreds of B.C. schools located in our active seismic zone are not constructed to withstand the tremendous forces unleashed by an earthquake.
Families for School Seismic Safety needs your help. Our policy makers control where public budgets are spent, and they need to be reminded that our our children are the most at-risk segment of our population. Tens of thousands of B.C. school students spend their school day in a facility which does not meet current life-safety standards for seismic performance. In 2004/05 the Ministry of Education identified 308 schools as priority projects to be upgraded or replace, yet despite some visible progress, half a decade later the vast majority of students in those schools remain at elevated risk.
Parents understand this is an unacceptable situation. Join our mailing list to find out how you can help us help all our children by sending us a quick note informing us of your contact information, school, school district or city. Send your note to info@fsssbc.org.
In the next few weeks Families for School Seismic Safety will undertake an awareness campaign to inform and remind parents and our public representatives that the pace of seismic mitigation and reconstruction projects must be stepped up to protect our children and all facility users.
Let us all make school seismic safety a full time concern and ensure our elected representatives fully recognize the urgency of this situation.
Latest News
Fall 2009, a New School Year: With the school year starting anew, interest in the seismic safety of B.C.'s public schools is once again in the forefront of parent's thoughts. Recently FSSS representatives have been interviewed by CBC (Monday Sept 7) and Fairchild TV (Tuesday Sept 8); on Wednesday September 9th at 1:32pm FSSS representative Michael Watkins will appear on CKNW's Christie Clark show.
Magnitude
7.5 Earthquake results in school collapse with 900 trapped,
condition unknown; Thousands of fatalities in region (Monday
May 12 2008 - CBC)
Xinhua said about 900 students were trapped inside a high school in
the Juyuan township, and students could be seen trying to climb out
from under the rubble of the three-storey building, while others
were heard calling for help. At least four Grade 9 students were
confirmed dead, while rescuers pulled 50 people from the debris. It
was not immediately clear if they were alive or dead. Several other
schools reportedly collapsed as well, Xinhua said, including five
in the Sichuan city of Deyang. (Images)
An appeal to Premier Gordon Campbell to accelerate the pace of action. (April 2007)
Promise to earthquake-proof B.C. schools called 'hollow'
(Friday March 2, 2007 - CBC)
A plan by the B.C. government to spend more than $1.5 billion to
upgrade schools in the province to make them earthquake-proof
within 15 years was a "hollow" promise made before the last
election, according to the head of Families for [School Seismic
Safety]. Dr. Tracy Monk said Thursday that, from what she sees,
work is proceeding no faster than it was before the announcement by
Premier Gordon Campbell in 2005.
School Seismic Safety Media Coverage, Spring 2007
The Earthquake Threat to BC's Schoolchildren
From Families for School Seismic Safety - a parent-led advocacy group trying to bring all BC schools up to acceptable seismic life-safety standards.
The problem
- In many neighbourhoods, the school is the most dangerous building to be in during an earthquake. Many schools are built of the most vulnerable materials and designs for an earthquake zone and may be at 100 times greater risk than average homes. Any school built before the 1970's may be at such risk.
- Geologists tell us to expect a moderate or even severe earthquake in the next 20 - 40 years. It is not a matter of "if", but of "when." The clock is ticking.
- Many of our schools may sustain potentially serious or catastrophic damage in a moderate to severe earthquake.
- Thousands of children may be injured or killed by school buildings. Many of the most vulnerable members of our society may be spending their days in our most dangerous buildings.
- In Vancouver alone, almost half the school buildings are considered at risk, based on assessments done in 1989. The engineering community tells us that there are likely hundreds of school buildings at similar risk around the province.
- BC is not keeping pace with other jurisdictions, such as California and Seattle, in making schools safe. At our current pace- upgrading work could take 60 years. Seattle is nearly finished.
- Making our schools safe can be done effectively and affordably due to advances in seismic upgrading techniques and can even be viewed as a cost-effective public health measure.
What FSSS is doing
We are meeting with local, provincial and federal officials to seek their support. Our provincial government must take a leadership role in working with our federal government to do the following:- Make a long term funding commitment to see this work completed within 10-15 years; FSSS was successful in persuading the provincial government to commit to this work, but the pace of construction from 2005 onward is far from meeting a 10 to 15 year completion horizon.
- Fund this work with new provincial dollars from outside the ministry of education. Life-safety is NOT an educational issue.
- Fund this work with federal infrastructure dollars and make it part of our National Disaster Mitigation Strategy.
- Ask the expert engineering community, through its independent licensing body (APEG) and the University of British Columbia, to define the best and most cost-effective solution to this problem based on best current evidence.
What You Can Do
- Go to our Take Action Page to send e-mail to government
- Help your school or district to join with FSSS to lobby federal and provincial officials to increase the pace of upgrading. Write to key Ministers: Bond, Christensen and the Premier, and Federal Ministers Emerson, Fortier, Cannon, Day and Stephen Harper. Try to enlist the help of your civic officials and Mayor to advocate to senior levels of government on behalf of our children.
- We think it would be wonderful if parents and all concerned citizens in all affected jurisdictions speak with one voice on this issue. (More than 2/3 of all citizens of BC live in the zone of risk.) If you support the advocacy efforts of FSSS, please say so in your letters.
- With upcoming elections, the time for mobilization of all forces is now. New money from sources like the federal government could only be good for education as a whole.
What building could be more important to a community than its school?
Who could be more important than our children? Help us to keep them safe.
Dr. Tracy Monk (Family MD and mother of 2, 1 in a high risk school – 1 soon to be)
Eugene Hodgson (Kitchener PAC Chair and father of 2 in a high risk school)
Nathan Lusignan (Student and Co-founder of the student-led seismic activist group: Van Tech Lizards)
(Above: Collapse of John Muir School on Pacific Avenue from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. Photo Credit: W.L. Huber)
(Above: Paso Robles earthquake 2003. Photo: CNN)
(Above: Paso Robles earthquake 2003. Photo: CNN)
Above: Bam, Iran, December 2003
Photos show the December 2003 collapse of an un-retrofitted masonry building in California. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to envision the devastation that would have resulted if these tons of bricks had landed in a school yard full of children. More than 2/3 of all masonry buildings in California have been at least partially retrofitted. Schools were legislated to the top of priority list in California since the 1933 Field Act.
Historic buildings can kill in quakes
By MARK HEDGES/The Daily Journal and The Associated Press- 12/24/2003
The deaths of two women in the rubble of a quake-toppled 1892 clock tower have underscored the danger posed by the thousands of unreinforced brick buildings still standing throughout California, 70 years after the state banned such construction.
Bricks-and-mortar buildings are usually the first to crumble during big earthquakes, as they did Monday when a magnitude-6.5 quake struck the state's Central Coast and reduced some 19th-century buildings in Paso Robles to rubble.
"The earthquake will pick out the weakest structures and very dramatically highlight their weaknesses," said Bill Iwan, director of the earthquake engineering research laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
The construction of unreinforced masonry buildings was outlawed in California after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, which caused widespread damage to the port city. Ukiah resident Dr. Allan Ward remembers vividly the events of that long ago Southern California disaster.
"It happened about 6:30 in the night, and I had just had a trip to the coast collecting things for zoology class -- I was in city college -- and I went to the college to put my things away and by the time I came home the quake struck," Ward remembered. "It demolished the school. It was a big earthquake and practically every school in Long Beach was just demolished."
Ward said that fortunately nobody was in school. "If it had happened at 2 in the afternoon it woulda' been thousands of kids killed; I mean thousands. So we were very fortunate that way."
Francesco Iovine Primary school in the Molise region of Italy, October 31, 2002
October 31 marks the anniversary of the collapse of the Francesco Iovine Primary school in the Molise region of Italy. Children were attending a Halloween party when their school building folded in on them. Nearly half were killed. The distraught parents of the village said after, that the school should have been the safest building in town, instead it was the only one to collapse. Although the circumstances of this school collapse were unique, in many ways, to factors at that site - there are many lessons to be learned from what happened there. We are sure that the parents of this village would have a message for us here in BC about how they would do things differently if they could turn back the hands of time. FSSS proposes that November 1 be named "Francesco Iovine" day until all BC schools are brought up to acceptable seismic life-safety standards.