For anyone but Rob Johns, finding yourself on the eighth floor of a strange building during an earthquake would be a frightening case of wrong place, wrong time.
Yet, despite fear and shock, Johns found himself going through the motions of a drill he’d learned, taught and practised in his three years as a Victoria emergency planner.
It was Nov. 19, 2010, in an aftershock in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was just one of many aftershocks that followed the devastating Sept. 4 quake that crumbled sections of the city. Johns was in town to study the effects of the initial quake. What he got was a first-hand taste of the power of tectonic plates.
In that eighth-floor room, Johns felt the floor sway like an amusement park ride.
The thought of running crossed his mind, but his training taught him otherwise. Johns found a desk, slipped underneath it, and covered his head.
“The movement was really quite incredible. It was as though the building moved back and forth a couple feet.”
When the ride didn’t end, Johns’ fear kicked in again. He thought: “this is a bit more interesting than I thought it would be.”
Others did run. They ran on Sept. 4 and in the 4,000 subsequent aftershocks. It’s an instinctual reaction, but a treacherous one, Johns says. “You can’t outrun an earthquake — it’s happening everywhere.”
Buildings’ facades, especially brick, loosened from their perches on Christchurch’s structures like they will here the day a quake hits.
So Johns and a team of planners are organizing the biggest earthquake drill this province has ever seen, called the Great British Columbia ShakeOut.
The plan has been in the works for more than a year.
B.C.’s ShakeOut is modelled after California’s version and a small army of emergency planners from the Golden State have played a big role in bringing the drill to this province.
“We are an integrated working group, representing all levels of government, stakeholder agencies and academic side with earthquakes,” said Heather Lyle, the Vancouver-based co-chair of ShakeOut’s organizing committee alongside Johns, who is based in Victoria.
ShakeOut’s organizers touch base with emergency planners from all participating B.C. municipalities daily, to share information and make sure everyone’s prepared for the mass drill.
“Our target initially was to get five per cent of the population (involved),” Lyle said.
Instead, the ShakeOut is on target to attract 10 per cent of the population, with 320,000 B.C. workers and students having signed up to participate — 64,000 in the Capital Region alone.
“It’s not meant to scare people,” Lyle said. “One of our objectives is to take away the fear by teaching people to protect themselves.”
Johns added emergency planners’ biggest challenge is educating people.
“Personally, I think it’s a really neat concept that we’re all going to do an earthquake drill at the exact same time,” he said.
“It will raise awareness of what to do in an earthquake, because people over 40 didn’t learn that in school.”
The Great B.C. ShakeOut takes place on Jan. 26 at 10 a.m. Turn on your radio and listen for the broadcast.
Following the instructions, drop under a desk, table, etc., cover your head against falling objects, and hold on until the ‘earthquake’ ends.
ecardone@vicnews.com