Aware yet under-prepared

Knowing you face a greater risk of an earthquake is one thing. Doing something about it is another.

People living in areas of Victoria at higher risk of earthquake damage are no more likely to prepare themselves for a quake than residents of lower-risk zones.

That’s one of the findings of two researchers who surveyed Victoria residents last fall about their perception of earthquake risk.

Zahra Asgarizade, a visiting PhD student form Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, and University of Victoria environmental psychology professor Robert Gifford are crunching the results of interviews with 100 people in higher- and lower-risk zones of the city, based on geological setting.

The study, which Asgarizade suggested and for which she did most of the data gathering, found the residents of the higher-risk zone were, on average, more aware of their risk. But they were no more inclined to have done anything about it than those in less-risky areas.

The typical respondent claimed to have carried out about seven or eight of some 16 actions listed by Asgarizade and Gifford to ease the impact of a quake.

“Based on other studies, I would guess that less was done than claimed,” Gifford says.

Asked how much a big quake would threaten their lives, respondents answered, on average, “slightly.”

The findings come as no surprise to Gifford.

“I would be surprised if I believed that people were rational — for example, ‘I am at risk, so I will take more precautions’ — but I do not believe we are rational,” Gifford says. “Of course, some people are rational but across a broad sample, we are not.”

Asked when they thought the Big One would strike, about 40 per cent said within 50 years, about 40 per cent said within 100 years, 10 per cent said within 10 years and about seven per cent said more than 100 years.

Gifford speculates that people’s perception of timing would be similar in Vancouver and elsewhere in the province.