West Coast may not be ready for Canada’s next giant earthquake. But this First Nation is

He wasn’t facing an earthquake, but ancestors’ hardiness inspired Qiicqiica Dennis to fix his life

Looking back, Qiicqiica Dennis thinks his awful trip five years ago — shattered, and terrified in the back of a car on a bumpy road home — echoed what his Huu-ay-aht ancestors experienced during the legendary earthquake and tsunami that happened generations ago. The heaving ground, the struggle to stay alive.

Back in 1964, long before science supported these tales, Dennis’s great-uncle — then-chief Louis Nookmis — described a night, centuries before, when the ground heaved and rolled and houses collapsed into the sand. In a recording for the Canadian Museum of Civilization, he said a giant wall of water swept through as birds escaped to higher ground. The people did not.

“They simply had no time to get hold of canoes,” Nookmis said. “They sank at once, were all drowned.”

Dennis now tells the story to children and their parents to teach them how to react when the next cataclysmic quake shakes the Pacific Northwest: Listen for the roar of the earth, brace for the rolling of the ground and then follow the birds to higher ground.

But that night, heaving and moaning in his friend’s car, all Dennis knew was that his life was in ruins and that he might not survive the night, much less an earthquake.

“I was an alcoholic and drug addict as long as I can remember,” said the 45-year-old, sitting on a log on at Pachena Bay beach, long hair blowing in the breeze. “I had to decide: Do I want to live or do I

want to die?”

Dennis’s personal recovery from addiction’s wreckage parallels his community’s emergence from the chaos of its own night of terror in the year 1700. His parents and grandparents, who had been tormented by residential schools, died young and left their grief with him. But Dennis realized that like his distant ancestors, he could cross life’s biggest chasms.

“My people have resiliency. They overcome obstacles and challenges. And I figured I can do it, too,” he said.

And as the next Big One looms for the millions of people in the Pacific Northwest, Qiicqiica Dennis and the Huu-ay-aht people are telling anyone who will listen how to get ready.

The Huu-ay-aht, on the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island, know what they’re talking about. They have held onto oral histories of ancient catastrophes for centuries. Only in the past 30 years have scientists found seismic proof that the Huu-ay-aht stories are rooted in experience. And it’s all likely to happen again soon.

Big quakes have occurred on average every 250 years over the past 11,000 years in the Pacific Northwest, according to scientists. The last one the Huu-ay-aht experienced was a giant temblor 323 years ago that left sedimentary markers all along the coast. That matches a written record of a 1,000kilometre wave that struck Japan’s coast later that day.

The question is not if but when the next quake hits, said John Cassidy, lead earthquake seismologist at Natural Resources Canada’s research centre near Victoria, over a map of the Cascadia subduction zone: a 1,000-kilometre-long “megathrust” fault that stretches from Vancouver Island to Northern California.

The surface of the earth is made of tectonic plates that collide, move apart or slide past each other, as molten energy from the centre of the planet puts pressure on them, Cassidy said. The plates’ movement is mostly slow and undetectable. But occasionally, when they slide under each other, it is not.

The small but dense Juan de Fuca plate near the coast of Vancouver Island is pushing on the lighter North American plate. It is now jammed, shifting just five or six centimetres a year. But the pressure is mounting and will eventually explode, shoving the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the continental one.

“It’s like bending a stick … eventually it is going to break,” Cassidy said. “This fault zone that has been stuck together for hundreds of years will slip between 10 and 30 metres within a minute.”

The chance that Cascadia’s slide will cause a quake of a magnitude greater than 7.0 on the Richter scale in the next 50 years is one in three, researchers say. The risk of a 9.0 megaquake, like the 2004 Indian Ocean quake/tsunami that killed more than 240,000 people, is one in nine.

“It will be a quake so big that it will be felt in buildings in Toronto,” 4,000 km away, Cassidy said: The rupture will, researchers say, cause 350,000 square km of land to roll and drop by several metres and propel two giant walls of water: One westward wave engulfing the coast of Japan and one devastating 1,000 km of the Northwest coast within minutes.

Many people on the coast, however, do not seem to take the predictions seriously. A recent Ipsos poll found only 54 per cent of British Columbians have a household emergency response plan and only 13 per cent say their plan is “complete.” Purchases of survival kits have dropped off since the COVID-19 pandemic, said Zenia Platten, marketing manager for emergency preparedness retailer Total Prepare: Most people haven’t stocked up, don’t have a safe place to ride out the quake and haven’t identified evacuation routes for when the tsunami is on its way.

But that’s not the case for Dennis’s tiny town of Anacla. Here, people are ready.

Traces that scientists like Cassidy found show that the Huu-ay-aht have endured at least 13 catastrophic earthquakes and killer waves over 3,000 years. Yet they always rebuilt their towns and stayed, developing an extraordinary hardiness — the strength that Qiicqiica Dennis reached for to change his life.

He told the Star about his community’s emergency plan for The Big One from the ruins of Kiixin, an ancient Huu-ay-aht village with remains dating from before the last temblor.

In the 1990s, when the First Nation council was planning a new community centre in Anacla, where about 120 members live, an elder reminded them of the tsunami that wiped out the village in 1700, Dennis said. As a result, the House of Huu-ay-aht, completed in 2000, was built 23 metres up a steep hill from the village, out of the tsunami inundation zone.

Since then, any new housing has been built near the community centre, said Councillor Edward Johnson. An earthquake-proof government office there serves as an emergency shelter for the whole community and has supplies to last everyone for three weeks.

Monthly evacuation drills see residents dash from ocean level up to the shelter in keeping with the legends of the past. It is work that began centuries ago but, like Dennis, it has had to overcome the disruptions of colonialism and broken lives to get back on track. Some elders once refused to participate in the drills, Councillor Stella Peters said, “But now we can clean the village (and get everyone to shelter) in 10 to 15 minutes.”

Contrast this with Victoria, a city of 90,000 people, where two-thirds of buildings would not survive a 9.0 quake, including the B.C. legislature, according to reports. With few evacuation options on Vancouver Island and Washington and Oregon’s flat shores, the death toll along shorelines could be unfathomable.

The biggest concern for Canadians is the susceptibility of tall and older buildings to a Cascadia quake, according to Tiegan Hobbs, a research scientist developing risk scenarios for Natural Resources Canada. At least 18,000 buildings will be damaged by the shaking of a Cascadia quake, according to the models, and these numbers do not include the effects of tsunamis, landslides, aftershocks, fires and the liquefying of solid earth that will cause more buildings to collapse.

This means that even though B.C.’s “Shake Out” drill had 700,000 participants last year, its “Drop, Cover and Hold On” protocols may not be enough to save people in those buildings. And because Canada does not have requirements to retrofit old buildings, Hobbs said, people may not be aware of their vulnerability.

The city of Victoria’s emergency management teams hold preparedness workshops for individual groups no matter how small, said community liaison, Doug Clarke. Victoria and Vancouver also have information on their websites for residents to understand their local risks, make evacuation plans and assemble emergency kits.

“Communications may not function as usual or at all,” states Vancouver’s emergency preparedness guide. “Resilience starts in your own backyard.”

But there is not yet a system to forewarn Canadians when what the C.D. Howe Institute calls “the world’s largest natural disaster” strikes. A project launched in 2016 to install oceanic devices to detect the initial trembling of a Cascadia quake and send out warnings has not yet been completed.

Pacific Coast residents feeling the earth heave beneath them and need to know what to do. In Japan, earthquake early warnings are automatically transmitted to cellphones, TVs and radios up to a minute in advance, and can be hardwired to systems like subways, elevators, hospitals and factory assembly lines to prevent injury. In Mexico City, a network of sirens blast when a tremor is detected, giving residents time to get to safety before the shaking starts. When an 8.1-magnitude quake hit the Mexican coast in 2017, many residents made it onto the streets or into parks away from shaking buildings before they felt the first shock waves.

In Anacla, the Cascadia warning siren is tested at 6 p.m. every Wednesday It reminds Qiicqiica Dennis of the strength he needed to overcome his own tidal wave of grief: Listening to his heart, bracing through recovery and finding higher ground.

“I thought if I can save myself, then I can save others too.”

Perhaps others can learn from the Huu-ay-aht, Dennis said.

“It’s always good to hope for the best. But the best thing you can do is prepare for the worst.”

‘‘ It’s like bending a stick … eventually it is going to break. This fault zone that has been stuck together for hundreds of years will slip between 10 and 30 metres within a minute.

JOHN CASSIDY SEISMOLOGIST ABOUT THE JUAN DE FUCA PLATE NEAR VANCOUVER ISLAND