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Some familiar, some less familiar natural disasters could prove costly


September 28, 2015   by Angela Stelmakowich, Editor


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Asked to consider the type of natural disasters that could potentially have a big impact on Canadians – resulting in billions of dollars of losses, insured and not – it would not be surprising if ice storms made the list, but what about volcanoes?

Speaking at RIMS Canada Conference 2015, being held this week in Quebec City, John Stix, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University, pointed to the volcano eruption five years ago in Iceland.

Canadians face losses from a many different natural disasters

“This was a very puny eruption and yet it generated huge losses worldwide because the whole North Atlantic and European air sectors were shut down for days,” Stix told attendees of the session, Natural Disasters and Their Impact on Canadians. “It just so happened that this volcano and the combination of atmospheric winds at the time made for a very efficient dispersion of ash across the North Atlantic into European airspace,” he said.

Couple these conditions with the fact that the aviation sector “did not know how to deal with relatively small levels of volcanic ash in the atmosphere,” Stix said.

While it may be a no-brainer not to fly in areas with high levels of ash, he said, “when you get several hundred or several thousand kilometres away from the source volcano, then what do you do? What is the safe level of ash in the atmosphere through which an aircraft can fly?”

Concerns in the wake of the Iceland eruption should also exist in North America, Stix suggested. Candidates most vulnerable and most susceptible to eruptions occurring are along the Cascadia subduction zone – home to a magnitude 9 earthquake in 1700 – which runs about midway through Vancouver Island along the Pacific coast to northern California.

That is “where the subduction zone is, where there’s active volcanoes, volcanoes which might erupt explosively, producing a significant amounts of ash,” Stix said.

“Because of the jet stream and the way in which the winds blow, ash will inevitably be pushed” elsewhere, he explained. “Depending on the direction of the ash, the duration of the eruption and so forth, there may be a significant effect for Canada and the U.S.”

Stix further explained that the modern jet aircraft engine today is more vulnerable than engines in the 1960s and 1970s. Because the modern aircraft turbine today burns at a very high temperature, as the volcanic ash is ingested into the engine, it clogs the engine’s spaces and “actually melts and turns into glass.”

Questions about how long aircraft can fly in an eruption column and how long it takes for an aircraft engine to be damaged need to be answered, Stix suggested.

“It’s important to do some planning, I think, in terms of the North American context before the next explosive volcanic eruption… occurs in Cascadian or the Aleutian Islands, which is absolutely inevitable,” he argued.

Planning is also essential with respect to a more familiar natural disaster in Canada – the ice storm, which John Gyakum, chair of McGill University’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, said during the same session is another natural disaster that could lead to tens of millions of dollars in losses.

Lasting Sunday through Thursday in early January, the ice storm of 1998 hit parts of Canada and the northeastern United, still ranking among Canada’s most expensive natural disasters in terms of insured losses.

Ice storms really are “one of the most devastating of winter weather hazards,” Gyakum said, adding that they can bring communities to a standstill because of the “devastating impact on power infrastructure.”

But the potential impact of an ice storm relates not just to the intensity of precipitation, Gyakum said, but also to duration and persistence. “Normally, a freezing rain storm has an average duration of about five or six hours, not five or six days,” he said of the 1998 event.

Showing attendees a chart of temperatures that January, “the augmentation of temperature beyond the normal climate is 40 degrees Celsius,” Gyakum noted.

“What is most pertinent about this calculation is that when we’re in the range of these temperatures, even the smallest incremental increase in temperature will produce a very large or exponential increase in precipitation rate,” he explained.

“This has a lot to do now with climate change, because when we’re getting ourselves up into the realm of larger amounts of water vapour and a lot of warmth, we’re getting into a dangerous area of an incredible sensitivity to small temperature increases,” he said.

Gyakum suggested ice storms – losses for which were about one order of magnitude lower than those associated with hurricanes in 1998 – may not have been on reinsurance companies’ radars back then. But more recent ice storms have included a 20-day event in China and a five-day event in Slovenia.

“The possibility of having these cases juxtaposed upon metropolitan areas, we could run into potential losses of tens of billions of dollars out of ice storms,” he told attendees.

Stix noted that earthquakes, volcanoes and volcanic ash, ice storms and hurricanes – a decidedly selective list of risks that Canada could witness – can all “have major repercussions for Canadians and the insurance sector.”

For example, a magnitude 9 earthquake – like the one in the Cascadia subduction zone 300 years ago – and its attendant tsunami “will generate very, very large losses for the region,” estimated to be about tens of billions of dollars lost, Stix said.

“When you project the region as a whole, we’re looking at losses on the order of a hundred billion dollars or more,” he said. “That’s similar to losses that occurred during Hurricane Katrina, during Hurricane Sandy and also the Tohoku earthquake,” he added.

Although a magnitude 9 earthquake could create a higher wave, Stix referenced a map showing that a 20-metre wave in Port Alberni would result in flooding of a large portion of the city very quickly after the quake. In more protected Victoria, a four-metre wave would mean just the edges of the harbour are inundated.

There would be a host of associated hazards following the earthquake and tsunami that “will occur, 100% certain, after this type of event,” Stix said, including significant landslides, strong aftershocks along the area of rupture (perhaps magnitude 6 or 7 quakes that, themselves, could be destructive) hours, days or weeks after the main event, liquefaction and fires, “an inevitable consequence of earthquake because gas lines are ruptured.”

“The message here is that proper zoning is really, really important,” Stix said, with respect to where to build and not to build. It is also critically important that building codes be enforced so structures can withstand intense ground shaking.

“Earthquake engineering these days is very, very good,” Stix commented, pointing out that modern building codes can withstand significant ground-shaking. “Urban centres such as Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle and so on, these are somewhat inland of a magnitude 9 earthquake event, so ground shaking will be less severe there compared to right along the coast.”

With regard to hurricanes, Gyakum noted that during so-called Hurricane Hazel, three dozen lives were lost in an hour in a Toronto neighbourhood as a result of flash flooding along a river bed after. Pointing out that the area has been rezoned, Gyakum said “this is an example of the cataclysmic nature, the very short time scales that are associated with flooding related to a hurricane or ex-Hurricane like Hazel was.”

Hurricane Sandy provides a more recently example, but also some lessons. “The classifiers that are associated with hurricanes, being wind, are somewhat disingenuous. We really have to worry a lot about the rainfalls, the storm surges and also the size of the systems,” Gyakum added.

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