Last week, just after lunch on the 23rd of June, the floor started shaking in Ontario and Quebec as it was hit by an earthquake.

The damage luckily wasn’t too bad even though it hit 5 on the Richter Scale according to the US Geological Survey. Only 61 km north of Ottawa is where the centre of the earthquake originated.

There have been quite a few descriptions of how the earthquake was felt, but the simplest one to imagine is construction work going on below you. One woman even experienced it as high as the ninth floor of her office building. Lorne said that the rumble felt quite small where he was, but he clearly felt them.

Whilst natural disasters happen very infrequently in Canada, they do happen and it brings home to us all how vulnerable we all are. It makes you think, how ready are you and your family for the big one?

There are many things you can do to ready yourself for such emergencies, but one important thing to remember is life insurance.

What many of us do not grasp is that along with disasters such as floods or tornadoes, earthquakes are one of the most expensive natural disasters. Earthquakes accounted for 30% of all devastation by natural emergencies from 1950-2001. Whilst disasters such as famine have an extremely high human cost compared to earthquakes, the damage during the same period was only 4% – certainly a big difference.

Even though only 75,252 lives were lost per year in the 90s, as opposed to 86,328 annually in the 80s, an average of 211 million people a year affected by natural disaster in the 90’s up from 147 million in the 80’s.

When analyzing natural disasters today to the 1960’s we see that there are 3 times the amount happening and the financial impact has climbed dramatically as well.

With the prevalence of natural disasters skyrocketing and the amount of lives involved increasing by the decade, one can’t help but think of how to guard their family’s future in case they find themselves caught in nature’s fury.

The great news is, all five major Canadian insurance businesses we surveyed will cover death in the event of a natural disaster. There are exclusions though, these will include natural disaster happening in locations such as war zones or any area that travel is not recommended.

Written by L.S. Marr, the founder of LSM Insurance and mortgage life insurance professional