ALASKA HIGHWAY NEWS THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 2023 | VOL. 79 NO. 1
The only newspaper in the world that gives a tinker’s dam about the North Peace. Est. 1944
FREE CLASSIFIEDS! 15 Words or Less *Some restrictions apply.
Contact Lynn @ 250-785-5631 or classifieds@ahnfsj.ca
: For all the news we couldn’t fit into print: alaskahighwaynews.ca
GREEN CARD
Tumbler Ridge geopark earns UNESCO endorsement NEWS h A5
How big an earthquake? By Stefan Labbé
When You Are Out in the Field, Time IS Money. QUALITY PARTS, EXPERT SERVICE! HoursMon-Fri: 8am - 5pm Sat: 8am - Noon
9224 100 Street, Fort St. John, BC (250) 785-0463
After Hours - Leave Message Flyers This Week: Peavey Mart, The Brick, Shoppers, Home Hardware, Walmart, Canadian Tire, Safeway
COPPER FIND Company encouraged by samples from Northern B.C. claim
NEWS h A2
SITE C PHOTOS See the latest progress from dam construction site
NEWS h A6 $1.50 INCL. GST
The shaking started just after 9 a.m., rumbling through the wilderness about 130 kilometres northwest of Fort St. John. The Nov. 11 seismic event first registered as a magnitude 4.7 earthquake, enough to send a Petronas crew fracking for gas into an emergency shutdown. They “immediately suspended operations for 24 hours to allow for the built-up energy to dissipate,” said the BC Oil and Gas Commission in an email. The next evening, another magnitude 3.3 event hit, and four days after that, a 4.6 quake struck a kilometre to the south.In the week since, seismologists have scrambled to check the numbers. The earliest seismic data came from a network of 160 seismographs run by the Canadian National Seismograph Network. But in the Fort St. John area, coverage is sparse, said Honn Kao, seismologist with the Geologic Survey of Canada who heads the federal government’s Induced Seismicity Research Project. As the days passed, Kao started receiving numbers from other seismograph networks run by the BC Oil and Gas Commission, several universities, and Petronas, which had its own instruments on site. Instead of occurring at 8.2 and five kilometres below the surface, the two biggest quakes were found to have struck at a depth of around two kilometres in the Montney Formation — exactly where Petronas had been fracking. “[The earthquakes] are very likely to be induced,” said the seismologist. “They occurred during active hydraulic fracturing and the location is very close to the injection sites.” To date, human-caused earthquakes in B.C. have been minor. When Kao and his team re-calibrated their calculations for the shallower depth, they downgrading the earthquakes’ magnitude to between 4 and 4.2. The BC Oil and Gas Commission, meanwhile, said there was no “concern for public safety,” that the company followed best practices and that operations in the area are expected to continue until Nov. 25. But Kao says there remain big open questions, and some scientists are still asking themselves, could humans trigger a major earthquake in B.C.? Continued on A5
250 *
1/4 page ads
* For local businesses only. *Deals do not include legal ads, or public notices
250-785-5631| AlaskaHighwayNews.com