This morning’s Ottawa Metro has a cover story entitled “Shaken and stirred”. It’s accompanied by a photo of Ian Vallance wearing a suit jacket and nothing else. According to the story, he’s a lawyer who was changing into his court garb when the earthquake hit. Instead of grabbing his clothes and shoes, he “just ran out of the office”.

This was probably one of the worst things he could have done and the next quote from him in the story demonstrates why:

“When we ran out, that’s when all the bricks fell down.” — Ian Vallance

It’s not unusual for things to fall off buildings. If you’re standing in the street, you’re at risk of being hit by falling debris and seriously hurt or worse. And if you’re not wearing any shoes, you may find yourself walking on broken glass.

Probably the best thing he could have done would been to have sought shelter in a doorway or under his desk, rather than run into the street in nothing but his underwear.

No argument from me that earthquakes are scary things and sometimes the fight-or-flight response that harkens back to the days when we lived in caves and hunted sabre tooth tigers (or were hunted by sabre tooth tigers) kicks in. If it does you have to try to resist running out of the building to where you’re likely to be in more danger than if you stayed put.

By now, you’re probably aware that Ottawa experienced an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 5.0 on the Richter scale earlier this afternoon at about 13:41 Eastern.

I was at work when it hit. For the first few seconds I thought it was just another blast at the construction site across the street, but I quickly revised that assessment to “earthquake” when it didn’t stop and there weren’t any audible “booms” like the other blasts.

The shaking started at a low level and then became much stronger. Then it ebbed to a lower level before it peaked again. I’m not sure exactly how long it went on for, but probably somewhere between 45 and 90 seconds.

After standing in my office for a couple of seconds, I hot footed it over to the door for the firestairs and stood in the doorway. Once it had passed, I headed back to my office, talked to a couple of people and decided that I no longer needed to be in the building so I grabbed my stuff and headed for the stairs. By this point, people from other floors were heading down the stairs, too.

Once out, I headed a safe distance away from the building where I met up with a co-worker and we headed across the street to a cafe while we waited for the chaos to pass.

One of the other buildings where I work had been formally evacuated, so there were a lot of people milling around outside. When we saw them heading back into the building, we headed back to our building and walked up the stairs, rather than taking the elevators.

I talked to my parents who were up at the cottage. They said the cottage creaked and shook and that they felt two distinct peaks in the vibrations. Their cat who was asleep when it hit woke up and was extremely agitated for quite some time afterwards.

I headed over to my parents’ place when I left work to check up and make sure everything was ok there. I noticed that many of the pictures on walls that run roughly east-west were crooked, while those on north-south walls tended to be straighter.

The biggest “damage” I came across was a picture frame on their desk that had fallen over.

At my place, the only casualty was a single picture frame that was slightly askew.

How did the earthquake affect you?

Selected news stories:

• CBC
• Ottawa Citizen
• CTV

So, I’ve been reading the full version of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan during the last week or so, along with a number of research articles that it cites. Of particular interest (to me anyway) is Appendix 2, which is titled “Eardley Escarpment description and conservation issues”. This is where the authors of the GPECP lay out why, in their opinion, climbing should be all but banned from Gatineau Park.

It starts off by describing what an escarpment is, in general terms, and then moves on to describing the Eardley Escarpment thusly:

Eardley Escarpment is a cliff lying along a south-south-west line. It is approximately 300 metres high, with an average height of more than 200 metres, and is the dominant topographical element in the Outaouais region. It begins in the City of Gatineau and runs north-eastwards along the Ottawa River for several dozen kilometres, forming a characteristic rock slope alignment.

To the best of my knowledge, the Eardley Escarpment, the aspect of which is approximately southwest, follows a line that’s aligned roughly northwest-southeast. If it ran “north-eastwards along the Ottawa River”, it would actually be oriented almost perpendicular to the Ottawa River.

If you look at the image to the right, you can see the Eardley Escarpment (I’ve marked it with a red line) running most of the way from top left to lower right.

But this isn’t the most problematic part of Appendix 2.

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John Goatcher, a local geocacher, sent me a map that overlays geocaches in and around Gatineau Park on top of the map found on page 39 of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan (GPECP). As he commented in my earlier post on geocaching and the GPECP, it’s surprising that more geocaches aren’t in the “integral conservation zone” (the dark olive area in the maps), given that it covers roughly half of the total area of Gatineau Park. As you’ll recall from my previous post, geocaches in the ICZ “will be relocated in areas that are less sensitive before the end of summer 2010”.

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The National Capital Commission has released some additional information about the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan on their website. Specifically, they have released a Fact Sheet, the Priority Initiatives and a document about the species at risk. The full 120+ page report has yet to be made available in electronic form, but I think that you can view it at the NCC Library.

In the Priority Initiatives document are the various activities that will be affected by the GPECP. Besides basically saying ice climbing is pretty much banned from the Eardley Escarpment because it may interfere with deer in the winter (even though other parts of the plan suggest that there are too many deer in the park and the law being used as the justification is a provincial law and not a federal law), it also mentions geocaching.

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The National Capital Commission released the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan (PDF version) last week, which they’re calling “an essential reference document for Gatineau Park through 2035”. Basically, the GPECP is a long-term plan for the management of the various ecosystems in Gatineau Park. It describes the current state of and threats to the ecosystems and the steps that they believe must be followed to in order to protect and restore them.

Included in the GPECP are key actions on how they’re going to deal with various issues, including some that directly impact the rock climbing on the Eardley Escarpment. Specifically, they seek to “[c]onfine rock climbing to the two or three most damaged rock walls, where rehabilitation work will not be effective.”

They plan on achieving this by…

• Identifying two or three walls on which rock climbing could take place, based on their impact on the Eardley Escarpment ecosystem, their current level of damage and their popularity (also applies to Eardley Escarpment).
• Changing the boundaries of the integral conservation zone, as set out in the Gatineau Park Master Plan, to accommodate these walls.
• Restoring the environment of former climbing sites that are not selected, including any access trails.

Effectively, this means that the number of routes available to rocks climbers will drop from an estimated 500 route to as few as 40. In other words, a 90% reduction in the number of available routes.

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