Vancouver Spared from Harm in 6.4 Earthquake
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck 175 miles west of Vancouver, causing buildings to sway in the Pacific coast Canadian city while causing no reported damage.
Residents of Vancouver Island, the 290-mile-long land mass to the west of the city, said they felt the impact. The temblor hit west of the island yesterday at 12:41 p.m. local time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
“It was scary but it was quick, it only lasted a few seconds,” said Cathy Falavolito, who with her husband owns the Westview Marina & Lodge in Tahsis, British Columbia, on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
The quake took place on a secondary fault, not the major Cascadia Subduction Zone, said John Vidale, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington in Seattle. There was no tsunami because the edges of the fault moved sideways, not up and down, so a major wave wasn’t generated, he said.
“There will be lots of aftershocks, but they’re in a place that aren’t likely to cause a lot of damage,” he said.
A damaging tsunami isn’t expected, the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center said on its website.
The earthquake was centered about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Port Alice, British Columbia, according to the warning center. It was the biggest in the region since November 2004, according to emergency officials, and caused no reports of injuries.
Felt on Barge
“The earthquake was felt fairly strongly in the Port Alice area,” Chris Duffy, director of operations for Emergency Management B.C., said on a conference call with reporters. “There’s no report of damages at this time.”
Falavolito, the marina owner, was on a barge with a dozen tourists when the quake occurred, she said. A lunch table onshore rocked and power went out for about five minutes before coming back on, she said.
“Usually you don’t feel earthquakes because you’re on the water, but we definitely felt it on the barge,” Falavolito said.
In the city of Victoria, the provincial capital at the south end of Vancouver Island, nothing was felt, according to a police spokesman, Mike Russell.
Workers in downtown Vancouver, which is separated from Vancouver Island by the Strait of Georgia, felt buildings sway.
“We just started to hear some squeaking, and our blinds were moving a little bit, and then it felt like I was on a boat all of a sudden,” said Stacy Rowa, an employee at Aura Minerals Inc. (ORA) who works on the 19th floor. She said she wasn’t aware of anyone being injured or any damage to the building.
‘Dizzy and Stunned’
On the 23rd floor of the HSBC building, “we were dizzy and stunned,” said Sharon Park, who works in fixed income at BMO Capital Markets. “It felt like waves and it lasted a minute or longer.”
Some in Vancouver felt nothing.
“I just came back from a walk and I didn’t feel a thing,” Renee Villeneuve, who works in the treasury department of forestry company Canfor Corp. (CFP) in Vancouver, said by telephone.
Several dozen aftershocks have been recorded, with the strongest being a 4.9 magnitude, according to John Cassidy, a seismologist with Natural Resources Canada, who spoke on the conference call with Duffy.
“This type of earthquake is actually relatively common, and on average about every 10 years we see an earthquake of this size offshore of Vancouver Island,” Cassidy said. “So it’s not really unusual. The really big ones occur hundreds of years apart.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Quinn in Ottawa at gquinn1@bloomberg.net; Doug Alexander in Toronto at dalexander3@bloomberg.net; Peter Robison in Seattle at robison@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net
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