Stress lines

For Dr. Lisa Tobber, protecting the lives and homes of thousands of Canadians involves smashing a lot of concrete. The structural engineering professor and her students love nothing more than to gather at their warehouse-sized laboratory on the UBC Okanagan campus, stick beams the width of bathtubs into industrial crushers, and wait with bated breath for the massive blocks to snap like popsicle sticks. The exercise is meant to help future homes and high-rise buildings stay upright during earthquakes, from minor tremors to major shakes.

“I’m a structural engineer, and earthquakes are at the heart of everything I do,” says Dr. Tobber. “If you want more sustainable buildings, or climate-resilient buildings, or more cost-effective buildings, you still need to make sure they’re safe in earthquakes.”

Earthquake resistance is a growing concern for cities scrambling to build new, low-cost buildings amid the ongoing housing crisis. British Columbia—Canada’s most earthquake-prone province—has a one-in-five chance of experiencing a major quake in the next 50 years, according to Natural Resources Canada. In Vancouver, a quake could heavily damage more than 6,000 buildings and kill or severely injure over 1,350 people, according to a 2024 report from the City Council.

Fortunately, engineers like Dr. Tobber are hard at work researching and testing new materials to make buildings stronger than ever, and cheaper too. Dr. Tobber specializes in prefabricated reinforced concrete, particularly “precast” components made in factory conditions, shipped to construction sites, and assembled like industrial-grade Lego bricks. She believes precasting could be the future of construction: Such buildings can be assembled faster and in more weather conditions. They’re more fire-resistant than traditional wood-frame structures, thus cutting down on insurance costs. And, most importantly to Dr. Tobber, each component can be precisely engineered to withstand seismic events.

“Prefab is very popular right now. You hear about its importance for addressing the housing crisis, so we have this massive program to figure out how these building components and connections behave under cyclic loading,” she explains.

“Cyclic loading” is engineer-speak for the process of trying to crush, twist, bend, pull, and shake components to simulate a seismic event. This sort of testing is the purview of UBC’s Advanced Structural Simulation & Experimental Testing (ASSET) Group, which Dr. Tobber leads. UBC has three structural testing facilities across its campuses.

Apparently, busting concrete in the name of science is a lot of fun. “It can be quite exciting, especially when something breaks. You’ll hear a loud pop! and I have many students who yelp when they hear it,” Dr. Tobber says.

The science behind earthquake-resistant buildings changes from region to region. Earthquake-prone BC, which straddles the Cascadia Subduction Zone, requires buildings that can withstand massive amounts of stress, which, ironically, means making some materials intentionally weaker, so that they can bend or crack without failing entirely.

“In some buildings, what we actually design for is damage. We allow the structure to deform: the concrete cracking, or the steel yielding. Now, what we’re preventing is a collapse. But it could mean the earthquake stops, and the building is crooked because of all this damage. And then there could be demolition.”

In places like Ontario, where the risk of major earthquakes is low, buildings are not subjected to the same seismic demands. Instead, design is often governed by durability and day-to-day performance, including resistance to wind in taller buildings and long-term material reliability.

“In low seismic regions, buildings don’t need to deform to the same extent as they would in high-risk areas. But they still need to be designed to resist earthquake forces and, above all, keep people safe,” Dr. Tobber explains.

The engineering itself is only one piece of a very complicated problem. Dr. Tobber identifies four key considerations when building new structures: seismic resilience, climate resilience (protecting from fires, heatwaves, and other climate-linked disasters), sustainability (building techniques that reduce environmental impact), and, of course, affordability. Balancing those factors is a Gordian knot that one can’t just crack apart like the concrete in Dr. Tobber’s lab.

“The industry is very risk-averse, so they try to reduce the risk as much as possible by doing things the same way they’ve always done them,” Dr. Tobber says. “So the problem is how we can get this out faster, because innovation cycles are so slow in construction.”

A lack of research and testing is a major hurdle. Most building codes were written for traditional cast-in-place buildings, and those codes can’t be updated for novel prefab materials and methods without further proof-of-concept.

“I have one postdoctoral researcher who is asking, ‘What are the barriers to industry demand for this technology?’ If you ask someone in construction, they’re always going to say ‘cost,’ but it’s not just cost. There’s a big lack of testing, and there aren’t enough facilities that can actually do the appropriate testing. So we have these novel materials, but we can’t use them in real life if we can’t prove their structural capability.”

Thus, Dr. Tobber consults with politicians, private companies, and fellow academics to help lay the foundation for policies and standards that can get the latest innovations out of the lab and into real buildings.

“I want to look into ways to integrate our approaches, because right now everything is siloed. We have our earthquake engineers. Our wind engineers. Our social scientists. Architects and city planners. It’s like trying to optimize your car when everything—windows, steering, the engine—is handled separately.”

Meanwhile, the chance of a major quake continues to rise. Canada’s last “megathrust” earthquake occurred in 1700 off the coast of British Columbia. Its estimated 9.0 magnitude force was so powerful that the resulting tsunami reached Japan. An earthquake of that size only occurs once every 300 to 500 years; we’re now in year 326 and counting.

Dr. Tobber believes that a coordinated effort can prepare us. Already, she and her colleagues have developed a large network of private companies and government organizations that are investing in research and testing novel solutions.

The goal isn’t incremental change, but a major shift that will be implemented in time to save lives and homes. This chance to make a difference is exactly why she went into structural engineering—to “do the big things,” to “invent something new,” and to “change the world.”

“I'm probably in the best job I could possibly be in,” she says.