Despite having one of the strictest building codes in the world, Christchurch, New Zealand, suffered severe damage in the earthquake that struck the city on Feb. 22, 2011.

The 6.3-magnitude quake was actually an aftershock from a 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck the area last September. Nobody died in the 2010 quake, and there was far less damage. That's mainly because the aftershock's epicentre was much closer to the earth's surface and to the city.

Some of the buildings that collapsed in the February earthquake were weakened by the first quake.

In 1935, New Zealand adopted a building code that recommended standards of design and construction that would make buildings more earthquake resistant. Masonry buildings, for instance, had to be firmly bonded with parts tied together, so the structure would move as a single unit.

The code was a response to strong earthquakes in 1929 and 1931 that raised public perceptions about the hazards quakes posed.

Building codes were revised several times in the decades that followed. The 1992 revision outlines the performance standards a building must meet — in areas such as structural stability and durability — in order to withstand the forces expected during an earthquake but does not prescribe how the building should be built. That allows engineers and builders enough leeway to use innovative design and construction methods to create earthquake-resistant buildings.

A rescue worker from Queensland in Australia walks past the rubble of the CTV building in Christchurch on Feb. 24, 2011. International rescuers intensified their search for earthquake survivors in New Zealand on Thursday, despite fading hopes of finding any more people alive. (Tim Wimborne/Reuters)In a major earthquake, the goal is to make sure that the building does not collapse and that people can escape from it, even if it is badly damaged.

Earlier versions of building codes only applied to new structures. But by the 1970s, older structures were required to be brought up to standards. However, many older buildings have not yet been upgraded — and it was many of those that were badly damaged in the Christchurch quake.

Revised Canadian standards

In Canada, building codes are regulated by the provinces. However, there is a National Building Code that sets out standards that the provinces rely on when setting their own regulations. In some parts of the country, building codes go well beyond the requirements of the national code to take into account specific conditions that exist in that part of the country.

The Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes has the authority to make immediate changes to the National Building Code without holding public consultations. Otherwise, changes to the code are made every few years. The most recent overhaul came in September 2005.

Substantial changes were made to the parts of the code relating to making buildings more earthquake resistant. The goal — as in New Zealand — is to minimize the chances of a building collapsing on top of people inside.

"Under the old code, buildings had to be able to withstand an earthquake that might happen in a region once every 575 years," said Carlos Ventura, the director of the earthquake engineering research facility at the University of British Columbia. "Under the new code, it's an earthquake that might occur once every 2,000 years."

Vancouver has embarked on a $1.5 billion program to make older schools in the city more earthquake resistant by bringing them up to code. Five years into the program, work has been finished on more than 80 schools. Work has started on another 40, but it will take years to complete the project.

Are we ready?

When Kenneth Elwood, a University of British Columbia civil engineering professor, travelled to New Zealand for an international seminar on seismic readiness this week, he found himself in a real-life laboratory.

Elwood saw the devastation wrought by the Christchurch quake and helped with rescue efforts, but his thoughts also turned to Vancouver, a city he says would fare better than Christchurch did in a major earthquake.

Christchurch has a lot of old masonry buildings, he said, and they're very vulnerable to severe earthquake damage. While there are some similar buildings in Vancouver's Gastown neighbourhood, overall, there aren't many such structures throughout the city.

"I would not expect the damage to be as widespread as it is here," Elwood told CBC News from New Zealand.

The Christchurch quake naturally spawns questions of just how prepared British Columbia and other quake-prone regions of Canada are.

Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, an independent, not-for-profit research centre set up by Canadian insurance companies, says that in many respects, B.C. is ready.

"New buildings are built to a very high standard," he said. "There's some retrofitting going on with schools."

Attention has also been paid to fire stations, he said.

That's not to say there aren't areas that could be bolstered. McGillivray's group has raised concerns about the possibility of fires sparked during an earthquake by transformers that in downtown Vancouver are located on wooden poles.

"British Columbia Hydro is actually addressing that issue, and they're putting several millions of dollars into undergrounding those facilities," said McGillivray. "Vancouver is pretty much the last seismically sensitive area in North America that has done that. They've already addressed that in places like San Francisco, so they're a little late, but they're doing it, and that's the important thing."

The institute put out a report late last year examining the lessons Canada could learn from quakes in Chile and Haiti.

"Preparedness is one of the big ones," said McGillivray. "If you look at the Chilean quake against the Haitian quake, it was much more powerful, 500 times more powerful than the Haiti quake. And yet, very few people lost their lives, less than 500 compared to a quarter of a million people, and that was preparedness."

While the centre considers that at the provincial and municipal levels a lot has been done across Canada to prepare for natural catastrophes, there are more concerns about what's going on in Ottawa.

"There is no plan to address a major catastrophe event from the federal level," McGillivray said. "A lot of work is being done … on the terrorist front but very little on the natural catastrophe front, and that's somewhat worrisome.

"We do know that a major quake will strike British Columbia. We know it will happen; we just don't know when. It's an absolute inevitability, and yet, there is no major plan or strategy to address it when it does happen. We fear it will be kind of addressed at an ad hoc level."

New Zealand sits on what is known as the Pacific Ring of Fire, an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones stretching from South America through British Columbia and Alaska and down through the South Pacific. It records more than 14,000 earthquakes a year. (CBC)