I live in Port Coquitlam, a small city just outside Vancouver. Among the many amazing things Vancouver is known for—mountains, ocean, a temperate climate, and unreal real estate prices—is something no city wants to be known for: we’re in an earthquake zone. 

So, I read Gregor Craigie’s (class of 2019) book On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake (Gooselane Editions, 2021) with interest, generously laced with a sense of foreboding. And Craigie’s book is, indeed, frightening. His descriptions of people surviving (and not surviving) earthquakes are spine chilling. Of the 2011 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, he writes: 

People outside watched in horror as the [Canterbury Television) building twisted and lurched in multiple directions. The windows exploded in unison as the concrete columns on the fifth floor collapsed and floor after floor plummeted to the ground. … Many of the more than two hundred people who were inside the building were crushed almost instantly, but some survived the collapse. When Kendyll Mitchell regained consciousness, she saw [her preschooler and her infant] were very much alive [but] covered in blood, which Mitchell quickly realized was coming from a wound in her head. She’d also suffered a large gash to her leg and a triple fracture to her pelvis. … The three were protected inside a small hole roughly one metre high by one metre wide. A steel beam directly above them protected them from a fatal blow. They were now entombed in a tangle of shattered glass, broken concrete, and bats of pink insulation. Mitchelle wiggled her foot out of the rubble but soon realized the broken bits of building above her were just too heavy to move. The elation she felt at surviving the building’s collapse was soon eclipsed by the smell of smoke. Would she survive an earthquake only to die in the fire that followed?

But On Borrowed Time is not only frightening: it’s also encouraging. In addition to vivid detail about what can happen in the wake of a quake (tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, economic collapse, homelessness), he also offers solutions. Not that any of them will prevent the next big one, but that there are things we can do to prepare on a personal level (preparedness kits that can be pooled with neighbours’ supplies to bring communities together in the face of calamity); inviting a seismic expert into our homes to advise on improvements that might help these structures withstand a temblor; and a community level (lobbying municipal and other governments to tackle expensive retrofits as possible and having clear disaster response plans in place). 

There was a reason I chose to write about Craigie’s book as September approaches. When my kids were small, at the start of each school year, parents were reminded that the next big quake could happen anytime in the next century. Of course, that was 40 years ago, so now they’re rounding it down to 50 years. 

So, every year at this time I’d pull my earthquake backpacks off the shelf by the door and check whether the clothes would still fit my kids, whether any of the food or medication (Tylenol, Epi-pens) had passed its expiry date, whether I could afford to add anything this year. (One year I added solar-charged flashlights; the next year, solar-powered radios.) 

My kids are grown now, and I live alone, but I still have an emergency backpack in my front closet. I haven’t updated it in a decade but after reading Craigie’s book, I might get on that. And that’s really Craigie’s main point: we can’t predict when the next big one will come. And no matter what we do, we might not survive. Some folks use that as their fatalistic approach to not preparing. To me, though, preparing as much as I can is about a different kind of survival: if I do nothing, my anxiety will keep me awake all night. If I know I’ve taken control of what I can, I sleep. 

Right. Next weekend, I’m hauling down my own disaster preparedness kit and making sure it’s up to date.

On Borrowed Time won the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Balsillie Prize for Public Policy

Want to read about some very different types of disasters?

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.