INNOVATION May-June 2014

4,000, said their houses shook and windows rattled. “Pretty much everyone felt it,” Mayor Bev Parnham said later. “It was quite a shake.” The quake occurred, coincidentally, less than a month after BC Auditor-General Russ Jones released a report which concluded that British Columbians in general and the provincial government in particular are woefully unprepared for an earthquake of catastrophic proportions. Jones noted that Emergency Management BC (EMBC), the provincial agency responsible for managing natural disasters of all sorts, is underfunded, and added: “In addition, EMBC staff is busy dealing with daily emergencies such as floods and fires, so catastrophic earthquake planning is done as a side- of-desk activity.” Jones went on to say, “British Columbians need to take responsibility and prepare for a cata- strophic earthquake to protect themselves and their families.” In fact, one institution in the Lower Mainland— the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver— has done just that and well before the Auditor- General sounded the alarm. The archdiocese is funding an initiative that will see earthquake warn- ing systems installed in all 51 elementary and sec- ondary schools within its jurisdiction by the start of the school year in September. The first system was installed at Star of the Sea Catholic Elementary School in Surrey this spring and teachers and prin- cipals throughout the board are slated to receive earthquake response training over the summer. “A few years ago Archbishop Michael Miller de- cided this was something that needed to be done,” says Paul Schratz, Communications Director for the archdiocese. “We have kids in our schools all day long. The responsible thing to do is to make sure they have every reasonable protection.” School district administrators elsewhere in the Lower Mainland have launched similar programs though they are not as advanced as that of the archdiocese. Russ Sales, Director of Facilities with School District No. 41 (Burnaby), says an earth- quake warning device has been installed at Burnaby Central Secondary School as a pilot project and a network of them will likely be put in place at schools throughout the district, although there is no firm timeline for doing so. As well, the Abbottsford School District has plans to complete a pilot project at several of its schools over the summer, says John Sherstobitoff, P.Eng., Principal, Seismic & Structures, of the Vancouver-based engineering firm Ausenco. Abbottsford further plans to install strong mo- tion detectors on the walls and roofs of some key buildings in the schools, adds Sherstobitoff, who is serving as a consultant to district administrators.

After an earthquake, these devices can help deter- mine whether a building has tilted, swayed or been significantly damaged and is, therefore, unsafe to enter. Tom Louie, P.Eng., Director of Facilities with the School District, adds, “The installation of strong motion sensors will help the school district to determine if schools can be used as a place of shelter post-earthquake for the benefit of the entire neighbourhood.” The earthquake warning systems were developed by electrical engineers at the University of British Columbia’s Earthquake Engineering Research Facility. Carlos Ventura, P.Eng., a structural engineer and director of the research facility, says his team began working on the project about 18 months ago. The systems use multiple, tiny ac- celerometers—no bigger than a fingernail—that are designed to detect vibrations and measure motion. “We used existing technology, but assembled it in a unique configuration,” says Ventura. “We came up with an assembly that allows us to use a large number of these sensors that cost just a few pennies each. By putting them together a certain way, we can optimize the quality of the signals and get very sensitive measurements.” The sensing devices—with their multiple ac- celerometers—are small enough to fit in a standard coffee cup. They are encased in a plastic cylinder and, in most cases, two of them are buried five to six feet beneath the surface and about 100 feet apart in the schoolyard. The sensing devices are con- nected by wires to black boxes within the schools and all signals and measurements are relayed to the Earthquake Engineering Research Facility and as- sessed by a computerized monitoring system. The system will pick up and disregard the trem- ors caused by the rumble of a transport truck or a slew of school buses arriving at the start or end of the day. But in the case of an actual earthquake, it will alert and trigger an alarm within the schools. All of this would occur in nanoseconds and give children, teachers and staff within the schools precious seconds—up to a maximum of 45 sec- onds—to seek shelter underneath desks or in other designated safe locations. The earthquake instrumentation programs are actually a small part of a much broader initia- tive launched by former Liberal Premier, Gordon Campbell. In 2004, Campbell announced that the government would commit $1.5 billion over 15 years for seismic retrofits of the province’s hun- dreds of elementary and secondary schools. In the interests of developing a common engineering ap- proach the provincial government contracted with APEGBC to develop Seismic Retrofit Guidelines (SRG) to be applied to the seismic retrofit of BC schools. APEGBC engaged UBC and leading

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