Quake threat to schools: Province must act

From this morning’s BC print edition of The Globe and Mail is an article by journalist Mark Hume – Province must act on quake threat to schools (subscription required). From the article:

We seem overdue, and the province has been getting ready for the next big one by undertaking seismic upgrades on bridges, tunnels, dams, prisons and liquor stores. The legislature will soon be earthquake-proofed.

What the government has failed to do, however, is seismically upgrade 311 schools identified in studies several years ago as being at high risk of “extensive damage” in an earthquake.

The government is not blind to this problem. In 2004, it promised to spend $1.5-billion to upgrade 700 substandard schools (those moderate to high risk) by 2019.

It just hasn’t followed through.

Instead of pushing seismic upgrade and replacement projects through, the government and school boards have been playing a game of “point the fingers”. One can’t help but have the sense that Gordon Campbell and his revolving chair of Education Ministers are engaging in a high-stakes gamble that there won’t be a big earthquake before the Olympic-induced construction boom runs its course. The government is gambling with both tax dollars and the lives of our children and their educators.

Parents, once fully briefed on the scope of the problem and inaction on the part of the government and school boards, are likely to take a dim view of such games of chance. We’ll elect a new board of trustees for Vancouver schools in 2008, and a new BC government in 2009.

While the government dithers, thousands of students are being put at daily risk.

We can’t predict the future, but British Columbia’s past is etched on seismographic paper and pressed into the geologic record. Sooner or later, another big earthquake is going to hit the West Coast. If it’s a magnitude-12 event, we may all suffer. But if it is more in line with the seven to nine magnitude earthquakes we’ve experienced since 1700, only the most poorly built structures will be damaged. Unfortunately, unless things change, 311 schools fall into that category.

Our prisons will be safe. Our liquor stores will be left standing. But our kids may be dead.

The government should rush ahead on the upgrading program, not wait and risk regrets that none of us could live with.