Timeline to seismically upgrade schools pushed back

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It will take at least another 15 years before all of Vancouver’s schools will be in a position to handle an earthquake.

The provincial government is pushing back the deadline for seismically upgrading schools by a decade, meaning some schools won’t be safe until 2030.

The province and Vancouver School Board are at odds over a few things including the extent of repairs needed to some structures, who will pay to house displaced students during renovations and whether some of the half-empty schools need the pricey work.

“We have been warning government that we need to pick up the pace. They will say they are supportive and to go ahead and do some of the preliminary work. But in some cases it can take years to get a project agreement. In the case of the last one we got, it was three years from when we submitted our final paperwork until they actually came back and signed the contract to fund it,” says the board’s Patti Bacchus.

“We have dozens of projects to go. We have been telling them for years we need to accelerate that pace. We had delays through the Olympics. They often get distracted with other priorities. But it’s time to make the safety of our kids the number one priority.”

The province has already spent about $218 million seismically upgrading 20 schools in the city and the rest were originally supposed to be finished by 2020, but that could take a while because some of them were approved 10 years before construction even began.

Vancouver has 23 schools that have been given the go ahead for upgrades but are still waiting for funding, meantime, another 40 are at risk that haven’t been approved.

So far, $2.2 billion has been spent or will be used to seismically upgrade or replace 213 high-risk schools across BC.

Last summer, the VSB announced the creation of a new seismic project office, to speed up the process.