Building for the big one

Lately Kris and I have had the pleasure of hanging out more with one of her friends from her old job in New West at Urban Academy, Allison, and her partner Osmar (or just "Oz" as people call him). In addition to being lovely people, they're in the process of doing a lot of renovations to their own place. Oz is actually a structural engineer who is doing his PhD examining wall assemblies under earthquake scenarios and helping to inform how buildings "should" be built to make them not just safe (i.e., not fall down), but actually functional (i.e., be usable after the quake and not have to be torn down). I then happened to pick up a copy of Outside Magazine that had an article all about what the big one would look like here in the Pacific Northwest (with an estimated damage cost of over $30 billion!). So...it's got my mind thinking about the earthquake readiness of our place...

The good news: 
1) We'll be building re-inforced concrete foundations and adding shearwalls to improve the structure considerably over what is there now.
2) We're cladding with stucco and it's a wood-framed house, both of which have some levels of quake-resistance.
3) We're located on decent soils and outside of a tsunami zone
4) We can also build in some other safety features like an easily accessible gas valve shut-off.
5) Vancouver is not as prone to big earthquakes as many other parts of the west coast and when the big one (a 9.0+ megathrust earthquake) does happen, it's likely to occur off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Accordingly, the effective size here will be closer to 8.5-8.7 (from what I'm told...) which is a lot less worse than a 9.0+! That said, it would still be massively destructive.
6) We're removing the chimney which is one big hazard in a quake
7) We've generally got the opportunity to build in as much earthquake proofing as we can.

The bad news:
1) Nothing really survives a 9.0+ earthquake without major damage.
2) We've got overhead electrical wires that can't be buried that will be live and come down in a bad scenario.
3) We're removing a whole bunch of walls in the front and back creating a so-called "soft story" structure (big openings on the bottom with house above) - these are a lot more vulnerable in an earthquake.
4) We can't afford to put in all of the earthquake proofing as one might like (don't worry Mom...we'll make sure it's safe).

Found a few neat sites including this one which we'll use as we go forward:
http://quake.abag.ca.gov/wp-content/documents/Plan-Set-A.pdf

And yes, Mom, we're putting together an earthquake kit.