Dozens of UBC buildings wouldn’t survive a major earthquake: report
Posted September 29, 2015 6:41 am.
Last Updated September 29, 2015 7:00 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Seismic safety is back in the spotlight this morning, following another pair of earthquakes off the Northern tip of Vancouver Island late last week.
But it’s not just bridges, tunnels and heritage buildings that are at risk.
A new report raises serious safety concerns about a number of buildings on UBC’s campus, in the event of even a moderate quake. Around 30 of the approximately 400 buildings at the university wouldn’t survive a major quake; a handful of those have hundreds of people inside almost every day.
Arno Rosenfeld with UBC’s student newspaper, the Ubyssey, discovered the seismic safety report.
“[The buildings] just weren’t built with the support,” he tells us. “If there’s lateral force — they’re shaking from side to side — they just don’t have the interior support and columns that will keep the buildings from collapsing or from partial collapse. Once that motion starts pushing on the sides of them, you end up with walls collapsing and parts of the roof falling in.”
“The reason UBC said they couldn’t repair these buildings is because there’s nowhere to move the students who were taking classes in there. In essence, everywhere on campus is full. The occupancy of some of these buildings are now over 500 students on a full day. I would say there are three or four of those buildings and then the entire psychology department,” says Rosenfeld.
The buildings most like to collapse were built mostly out of concrete between the 1950s and 1970s.
