It's hard to really prepare for something when you don't know when it's going to happen (a hundred years from now or this afternoon) or how big it's going to be (a few cracked windows and lurching highways, or Vancouver reduced to a pile of rubble)... but having an emergency kit and some kind of plan is a start. I work at the local hospital so would probably have to stay if it happened during the day, so that is our family meeting place, otherwise home. Kids know that pay phones are more likely to work than anything else, and to conserve cell phone battery power.

Heading for the hills - well, the hills can fall down too. Our house is built on part of a slide that came down from Mount Cheam a few hundred years ago (probably during one of the previous "big ones"), and the mountain is a couple of miles from here.

The open valley bottom isn't much better, being allluvial and with a wateer table just a little ways down, some models show that, in a quake, the soil would liquify and everything would just sink out of sight.

Then there is the tsunami danger, plus the possibility of a major slide blocking the Fraser Canyon, damming the river and then releasing in a Biblical flood.

Saskatchewan is looking better all the time!