Scientists, insurers disagree on
quake risk

Those who started this week trembling under the nearest doorway were quickly reassured that the quake that hit the city Monday at 6:41 a.m. was all shake and no bake. The seismic shift measured 3.9 on the Richter scale and was centered 75 kilometres northeast of the city, not enough to stir seismologists who consider it business as usual, seeing as how Montreal gets hit with over one quake a week, with only five a year being strong enough to notice.

But the private sector considers the possibility of an earthquake devastating our city as less remote. Risk Management Solutions, a California-based company whose expertise on the prospects of natural disasters helps 80 per cent of Canadian insurers set their rates, argues that a Montreal quake could lead to some serious local destruction. Their top catastrophist reported in 1997 that Montreal is “vulnerable to low frequency, large magnitude earthquakes where strong ground motion and heavy damage concentrations can lead to fire ignitions and conflagration. Impaired emergency response capabilities and unfavourable winds can quickly aggravate the situation.”

Our football-shaped island lies on the middle of a tectonic plate that makes it unlikely that we’ll get hit with anything higher than a six on the Richter scale, something that has happened in 1935 and 1988. So the chance of the earth simply opening up and swallowing us isn’t huge, insists Maurice Lamontagne, a federal government seismologist. “It’s about the same as the probability of a meteorite falling on us. It’s not zero, but it’s very low,” says Lamontagne. :

—Kristian Gravenor