85% of Vancouver district school children enter an unsafe building each school day

One of the advocacy projects I'm working on in my copious spare time is the on-going effort by parents to force local, provincial and federal governments to step up to the plate and once and for all deal with a looming disaster in our midst ... earthquake safety in Vancouver and other at-risk B.C. communities.

Last night I went through the entire inventory of Vancouver schools and apportioned students into "at risk" or "safer" buckets according to the seismic assessments done in 2004. Here's what I come up with: Seven of every ten Vancouver district students sit in an unsafe classroom each school day.

The safety issue is actually worse than that. If one accounts for all children attending a facility with one or more at-risk building blocks there are more than 45,000 of Vancouver's 54,000 school children (four of every five) exposed to elevated risk from earthquakes.

My review only took into account Vancouver School District - #39. While we have the most students at risk of any single district in the province, there are many tens of thousands of additional B.C. students and other school facility users that need and deserve safe schools too.

In an instant a significant earthquake can change our city. In May of this year in an instant thousands of children were killed by their own school collapsing upon them in China's Sichuan province. We've seen the same sorry tale play out all over the world.

These disasters do not only visit far off lands. It isn't a China or a Pakistan problem, it is our problem. We will see a major earthquake in this region, very likely within our lifetime. We mustn't gamble with the lives of tens of thousands of B.C. children, yet for every day projects that we know must be done sit on waiting lists unapproved and unfunded, that is exactly what our society is doing.

We should all be shocked but aren't as many parents are completely unaware scope of the problem. If you are a Vancouver area parent, next time you are at the school yard have a look at the kids and consider that on every school day 4 out of every 5 Vancouver children will spend their day in unsafe classrooms, gymnasiums, workshops, science labs, libraries, administration offices, change rooms, lunch rooms and wash rooms.

This is not an issue which only affects the obviously very old schools in our city. Almost every single school built prior to the 1970's (and even some of those built as recently as thirty years ago) requires either seismic upgrades or total replacement.

Our provincial government made a big promise in 2004 to fix and replace the broken schools but they've not yet achieved the objective they set for themselves. Its time to see that promise fulfilled: fix or replace the dangerous schools.

We are not talking about a divisive issue. Ideology plays no part in this. All parties and any government will want to do everything possible to ensure the safety of our most precious resource, our society's children. Committing the right amount of money and to an accelerated schedule to address all of the hundreds of B.C. schools at risk is simply the right thing, the only thing, to do.