[Vulcan]

Here's an article from an old school mate saying how the media likes to sensationalize the big one is coming.

The latest example was an article on the front page of The Globe and Mail in February of 2007, which read:

B.C. put on alert for huge quake; Vancouver Island entering ‘rush hour' of seismic activity.

Scientists have alerted British Columbia's emergency-planning department to the possibility of a catastrophic earthquake striking the province's southwest coast next week.

“The headline on that article and the lead in sense were absolutely outrageous,” said Rogers. “That headline got picked up by the Canadian Press and various other things and went zooming around the world and all of a sudden it changed from an interesting scientific event…to we had predicted a large quake on the West Coast, which we had not.”

http://www.sciencejournalism.net/garry_rogers.html

Here's some more information.

The last one hit the Pacific coast more than 300 years ago. First Nations oral history tells of canoes being tossed up into trees and entire villages — like the one in Pachena Bay — vanishing in the night.
That quake sent a tsunami racing across the Pacific, and the arrival time was noted when the waves washed ashore in Japan. "They had good timekeeping," says Rogers, explaining how the Japanese record enabled researchers to determine that the quake struck off Vancouver Island at about 9 p.m. in the evening Jan. 26, 1700.
Such quakes occur with centuries-long frequency in the Pacific Northwest. Researchers have uncovered buried marshes and submarine landslides that they have linked with 22 "megaquakes" going back 10,000 years along the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs along the coasts of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.
They strike on average about every 500 years, says Rogers: "We have a 10,000-year record of big tsunamis, and we know that the earthquakes can be magnitude 9, perhaps even slightly larger."


http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Mon...087/story.html