Statement

Families for School Seismic Safety

May 13, 2008

Statement in response to earthquake in China

VANCOUVER - In response to the tragic news from China in the wake of the earthquake that struck the Sichaun province, Families For School Seismic Safety (FSSS) expresses its condolences to the victims and their families, and encourages all levels of government to act swiftly to ensure similar tragedies are prevented.

According to news reports, thousands are dead and thousands more are trapped in building collapses following the powerful 7.9 magnitude quake. News agencies are reporting several school collapses that killed hundreds of children and trapped even more.

FSSS formed after the 2002 Italian earthquake, which claimed the lives of 26 students. Parents were shocked to learn that while homes withstood the earthquake, it was the school that collapsed.

"These terrible tragedies can and must be prevented, and we know how to prevent them," says FSSS director Nathan Lusignan. "We'd hoped we'd never hear news reports like this again - reports of children being buried in their collapsed schools. But since then, many more schools have collapsed and many children have perished. These are preventable tragedies. They should not happen."

In 2005, the BC government identified more than 700 BC schools as requiring seismic upgrades. Progress, however, has been very slow and few schools have been completed. Thousands of BC students continue to spend their days in schools assessed as being at high risk of significant structural damage in the event of an earthquake.

FSSS urges all levels of government to take an integrated approach to ensuring schools are upgraded in a timely way and in a manner that provides the best possible educational facilities to safely and effectively service future generations of students.

"We need concrete plans and clear timelines to ensure the work gets done as promised," says Lusignan.

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For information, contact Nathan Lusignan, 604-813-0100

Latest News

China Quake Toll May Be Worse Than Initially Feared (Sunday August 31, 2008 - NY Times)
The government said that about 70,000 people in Panzhihua alone were affected by Saturday [August 30] earthquake. And in one region of Sichuan, about 660 school buildings were destroyed.

B.C. coast shaken by powerful earthquake (Thursday August 28, 2008 - CBC)
[Earthquake scientist Garry Rogers, with the Geological Survey of Canada] said "[It's] an active volcanic region offshore under the water [and] has lots of small earthquakes. Typically, they occur like this, in swarm activity. They're all connected to land and eventually we will have larger earthquakes on land because they are all part of the system."

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)

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.

Campaigns

April 7 2008: Letter sent to Premier Campbell asking the Premier to recommit to addressing the school seismic safety issue without delay.

Speak Out - Letter Writing Campaign

FSSS has created a package of materials including an update to parents as well as a letter template (includes email addresses for key decision makers) which parents can use as a basis for contacting school board, provincial and federal officials.

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

• Make a long term funding commitment to see this work completed within 10-15 years from today.
• 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.