About 10 million people live in Canada’s earthquake-prone zones. Yet few have practical knowledge of what to do with new early warning system alerts which aim to save lives and protect livelihoods.
Earth’s interior 80 million years ago with hot structures in yellow to red (darker is shallower) and cold structures in blue (darker is deeper).
Ömer Bodur/Nature
When researchers look at CCTV footage of how people really react during earthquakes – as opposed to what they report after the fact – it looks like alerts aren’t yet inspiring protective action.
On Jan. 15, 2022, coastal areas across California were placed under a tsunami warning.
Gado via Getty Images
Tsunamis aren’t just bigger-than-average waves. Triggered by undersea earthquakes or volcanic eruptions like the one in Tonga, they are fast, massive and potentially destructive. Here’s why.
Future events could damage the critical portion of the undersea network which links to Australia.
Vehicles line up during a drive-through COVID-19 vaccine clinic at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ont., in early January 2022.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lars Hagberg
Canada’s emergency management system is poorly funded and lacks consistent attention between disasters. This chronic underfunding has undermined public confidence and trust in emergency management.
Destroyed buildings in San Francisco, Calif., after the 1906 earthquake.
(H.D. Chadwick/Wikimedia Commons)
Today’s building codes were implemented as a result of devastating natural disasters that resulted in the loss of human lives and billions of dollars. But they aren’t retroactively applied.
In 1989, Newcastle was hit by Australia’s deadliest earthquake, but high-rise development in the city’s CBD has continued nonetheless. Australia needs a consistent planning code for earthquake risk.
Many Victorians claim their cat or dog was acting strangely before yesterday’s earthquake. And while there’s no real evidence animals can predict a quake, they may be more sensitive to very tiny ones.
A building in Melbourne damaged by the earthquake.
James Ross / AAP
If building regulations required cheap fixes such as ensuring chimneys and parapets were structurally attached to the building, we could save lives during earthquakes.
A largely hidden fault beneath the Victorian Alps has triggered a magnitude 5.8 quake that was felt as far afield as Sydney, Adelaide and Launceston. Here’s what we know so far.
Some of the worst risks of earthquakes are in a zone running from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River that includes major cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Québec City.
Search and rescue workers hunting for victims in Les Cayes, Haiti, on August 17, 2021, after an earthquake shook the country.
Orlando Barria/EFE/Alamy Live News
Aid workers are struggling to help Haitians with the latest devastating earthquake. A professor of disaster reduction assesses lessons learnt from the last one in 2010.
Natural disasters are not uncommon in Haiti; neither is political instability.
Reginald Louissaint JR/AFP via Getty Images
Devastating quake came weeks after the assassination of Haiti’s president. A scholar of disaster preparedness explains the concept of ‘cascading crises’ and how other countries can help stabilize Haiti.
Drones are increasingly being used in disaster management.
(Shutterstock)
Japan has a long experience of hazards and disasters. Yet it does not seem like all lessons have been applied when it comes to COVID.
Men cross the front of the still smoking lava rocks from an eruption of the Mount Nyiragongo on May 23, 2021 in Goma in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
GUERCHOM NDEBO/AFP via Getty Images