Our humble little province was hit with a 7.7 magnitude quake off the coast of the Haida Gwai last week, and while there were no reported causalities or injurie,s a 7.7 quake is still nothing to sneeze at, particularly if you don’t want your nose ripped off your face and shoved down your left bronchus by the cold, unfeeling pincers of Mother Nature. Fortunately though, this particular quake happened pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and caused no significant damage.
Unfortunately, this might be neither the worst nor the end of it. If you’ve paid any attention in your high school’s earth science or geography classes, you were probably a nerd — and not the billionaire-at-27 kind of nerd neither — anyways, if you did, you would’ve learnt that Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland, and in fact pretty much the entire northwest coast is situated on top of something called Cascadia Subduction Zone.
This leaves our fragile little cities prone to mega thrust earthquakes (Not to be confused with mega thrust girthquakes, that’s something completely different but equally serious). These are the kind of quakes that rip apart cities and turn skylines into scrapheaps.
Anyways, the seismologists at The Peak (Your student levy at work, people!) have come up with some essential earthquake preparedness tips.
Move!
Earthquakes, unlike student loan officers and unwanted children, won’t follow you province to province. Case in point: the easiest way to avoid being crushed by a dislodged Science World rolling down Main like an out of place Indiana Jones reference is to just move to the East Coast, where nothing bad ever happens.
Take to the skies!
Another weakness of the earthquake is that they are when the earth quakes. By keeping a hot-air balloon perpetually running in your backyard, you’re free to take off at a moment’s notice, leaving that troublesome earth nonsense behind.
Be the protagonist!
Let’s face it, in these natural disaster movies the only person who survives is the protagonist, and that’s only so the movie studio still has the option to do a sequel. As far as I know, there are three criteria to being the hero in a disaster movie. You have to be an incredibly attractive, in top physical condition, and you need to see the disaster coming a mile away and have nobody believe you up until it actually happens. Well at least, after reading this you’re one-third of the way there, champ!
Jump!
If you time it just right and jump just high enough, you should cancel out the ground shaking underneath you and theoretically come out unscathed. It works almost as well as jumping in a crashing elevator.
Get like 100 dogs!
Animals have the uncanny ability to detect subtle changes in the earth’s magnetosphere that precede seismic activity, and freak the hell out. If by some freak coincidence, your legion of hounds (awesome band name) fails to detect the earthquake and you get trapped with them, you’ll easily have enough food to last until the rescue crews reach you. So win-win.
Richter Scale!
The Richter scale, named after comedian Andy Richter; most well-known for his brief lived sitcom and for being the voice of one of the lemurs from Madagascar, is a general measure for how terrible one’s life is going. Recently, it has been co-opted by scientists in order to measure the strength of earthquakes and other seismological activity. Now unlike any well-known forms of measurement the Richter scale uses a logarithmic scale, meaning that each number on it is 10 to that power more powerful than zero. This also means that you probably can’t read it without a Bachelors in Math or protractor or whatever.
Luckily, always looking out for the common man, The Peak has come up with its own earthquake rating scale, one that you don’t need a rocket degree in numbernomics to understand. Let’s go!
0
Not an earthquake. It’s a zero, why did you even bother to check the scale?
1
Might be an earthquake, or you might have just gotten a text. Check your phone.
2
Vibrations not as bad as the people who won’t stop asking if ™anyone else felt that?∫
3
Should be possible to counteract the effects by jumping at right moments.
4
Okay to disregard ™Shake well before opening∫ instructions.
5
A typical day in the life of a Chihuahua.
6
National Museum of Etch A Sketchˇ Art destroyed.
7
Panics breaks out as a shortage of doorways to stand in becomes apparent.
8
Sound of maracas, tambourines and sleigh bells emanating from music stores deafening.
9
™Hey honey, has the sky always been upside-down like that? Honey?
10
Vengeful god is actively trying to restart the universe. Only blood sacrifice will appease him now.
By Gary Lim
Layout by April Alayon
