Earthquakes in Canada “low probability, high consequence,” says Munich Re

Major earthquakes don’t happen much in Canada.

The only recorded magnitude 9 earthquake to ever affect the Great White North shook Cascadia, or the northern B.C. coast, in 1700.

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Vancouver and Victoria are most at risk of seismic activity while the Haida Gwaii Island faces the greatest threat of a tsunami.

Though extensive catastrophe modeling in Canada is “state of the art”, according to Munich Re’s head of corporate underwriting, Alexander Allman, it’s the unexpected nature of earthquakes in Canada that makes them risky.

The subject arose at the Canadian Catastrophe Conference held by CatIQ in Toronto.

“A market like Canada, low probability, high consequence, that’s much trickier for a risk modeller than California,” Allman said.

Tom Larsen, Hazard Product Architect at CoreLogic explained that because earthquakes so seldom happen in Canada, the building design codes aren’t prepared for these events.
“Big events cause millions of claims if you have bad luck and they have to be adjusted. You (Canada) don’t have that much experience with earthquake adjusting,” he said. “That will be a problem because all the procedures aren’t in place.

“We have a stronger likelihood that when that really bad earthquake hits the east coast it’s going to be worse than we planned for, whereas on the west, we know how bad it is.

“That’s kind of frightening, when it occurs we’re going to be less prepared than we should be.”

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Allman said his company’s research showed little is known about fault lines in Canada.

“Our whole idea of mega earthquakes is related to that one event (in 1700),” Allman said.

“Cascadia hit a bend right in the area of Vancouver. Does it have any impact? We don’t know. These mega earthquakes can cause other earthquakes.”

A recent study, Quake 16, found the federal government was so unprepared for the event of a magnitude 9 hitting Vancouver and Victoria that both cities could lose 60% of their communications.

But most people aren’t expecting that to happen.

“Christchurch had a sequence of earthquakes, in New Zealand… they had multiple events and they all happened in a region which we thought was low seismicity,” Allman said.

“We have a very limited idea of low seismicity regions – and Canada is one of them. If you look in the historical record, there is nothing. There’s no loss data, there’s nothing in the east.”


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