Earthquake and tsunami early-warning sirens will be sounding on Vancouver Island through the weekend.
It’s part of a program testing two systems in Port Renfrew, one in the Pacheedaht First Nation and one in Jordan River Regional Park.
The siren systems, worth $650,000 in total, can be triggered by sensors, set off manually from a facility such as a fire hall, or activated remotely with the authority of the manager of Emergency B.C. in the Capital Regional District, said Mike Hicks, CRD director for the Juan de Fuca electoral area. The systems were designed by the University of B.C.
Siren testing took place in Jordan River Regional Park on Thursday. Port Renfrew and Pacheedaht First Nation will hear testing through Saturday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. with a full test on Sunday at 11:30 a.m.
If all goes well, the sirens be operational within the month.
Port Renfrew has a population of about 189 and the Patcheedaht First Nation a base of 98.
Hicks envisions the sirens would make a difference in a scenario where a magnitude-9 earthquake strikes on the Cascadia subduction fault line. He imagines a strike at 2 a.m. on a summer’s night when Port Renfrew’s population has swollen by at least 1,000 surfers and campers. Time would be of the essence to escape to higher ground.
“That huge tsunami at 2 a.m. when we have to get [people] up and out, that’s what we’re trying to tool up for here,” he said.
The decade-old siren currently in place wasn’t manually set off by the Port Renfrew fire hall on Jan. 23 after a 7.9-magnitude quake struck off Alaska at 1:31 a.m.
The quake was centred 278 kilometres southeast of Kodiak, Alaska.
Emergency Management B.C.’s provincial duty manager activated the emergency notification system to alert first responders, community leaders and First Nation communities from Haida Gwaii to Victoria, said Hicks. A social media team posted information on Twitter under the handle @EmergencyInfoBC. A broadcast Alert Ready was delivered in vulnerable zones.
The provincial emergency notification system also broadcasts warnings to local emergency co-ordinators, mayors and Indigenous communities. It is then up to the municipalities to decide whether they issue an emergency alert and not all of them use text message warning systems.
That’s why people in Tofino heard warning sirens, while residents in low-lying areas of Saanich, Colwood and Esquimalt were roused by door-knocking firefighters, and some in Sooke were alerted by friends or neighbours.
“We made a decision not to set the sirens off because the CRD has its own emergency service people … Our policy is to monitor the tsunami and make a decision two hours before it’s going to hit the CRD,” Hicks said. A tsunami never materialized.
Some residents in the Juan de Fuca electoral area wanted to hear sirens as a warning while others were only interested if the threat was imminent.
Chris Duffy, executive director of Emergency Management B.C., said on Thursday that the province will continue to use a “full suite or range of tools because there’s no silver bullet” notification system. “What works in Sooke isn’t best for Nanaimo or Tofino,” he said.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ordered that by April 6, 2018, everyone on a high-speed wireless communication (LTE) network must be able to receive the same public alerts now broadcast on radio and TV in the event of natural disasters.
That would bring Canada’s emergency alert system in line with the United States, where each state or county has the ability to send an alert to wireless carriers, which is then transmitted to customers.
This will allow for more reach but there will still be gaps — places that don’t have cellphone coverage, Duffy said.
“All of these types of systems provide the best leverage and amplification we can get.”
