B.C. company makes earthquake retro-fits affordable
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This video first ran in September 2011.
Narrator: There is no doubt that a major earthquake will strike BC’s Vancouver Island. The only question is when? That was certainly on the mind of Mike Ursel when he moved to Victoria, BC 10 years ago from the prairies. After talking to locals, he realized that there wasn’t really a lack of awareness, but rather a lack of options or actions being taken to protect residential homes from major earthquakes. After letting the idea percolate for a while, Mike spent the last four years seriously researching and developing his earthquake retrofit program and earlier this year founded QUAKESAFE.
Any new business is tough to get off the ground, but Mike is faced with a couple of obstacles, one being the attitude of long time residents.
The people that are most concerned tend to be the ones that are moved here from Calgary, or Edmonton, or came in from the interior, and they’ve been living here for months or a few years and it’s on their minds. Whereas the people that were born and raised (here) it tends to be something they just live with I guess. Attitudes are changing but we are still 15 or 20 years behind what they are doing in San Francisco and California in general, and even just south of the border in Washington, we are way behind.
One of the biggest obstacles we are faced with, or at least I believe we are faced with, is when people hear of earthquake retrofits they think tens or many tens of thousands of dollars. They think of disruption to their family life for months, and I think that perception has been built by these retro fits to schools and other government buildings that have been costing millions of dollars. That’s not really the approach we take at all.
What we’re looking at doing is we’re doing retrofits for the average family, the average family home; very affordable things that we do that don’t take a lot of time. And generally we’re looking at doing mostly older homes. Homes built before 1980 were not securely bolted to the foundation. So one of the most important things we can do is go around the perimeter of the house and properly secure it and anchor it into the foundation with special bolts and plates. The next thing we do is build up a shear wall from either the basement wall or the pony wall that sits on the foundation. Those are the ones that tend to collapse sort of laterally, so we will build a shear wall to make sure they stay standing. That, and some special hardware we attach to internal posts and structures, is generally the biggest bang for the buck for the home owner. Generally our retrofits take one full day to two full days and the work will be done. It’s almost all done in the basement or the crawl space though we do some investigation and some upgrade to the attic space as well.
Narrator: After the retro fit, Mike does not guarantee there will not be damage to the home, but it will be greatly mitigated and still standing.
Generally what we tell people is that If we can keep their home upright and on the foundation, everything else if fixable. You’ll have dry wall cracks, you may have broken windows, you may have some other minor damage, but if we keep the house upright and on the foundation, the house will be livable after. We’re not telling people that they are 100% safe now, there’s no problem, but we’re saying your house will sit on the foundation. And if it sits on the foundation and doesn’t collapse then people don’t get killed or hurt and you have a place to live after the earthquake. We save the home and we save the contents and family from catastrophic and it’s really not that expensive.
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