Paramedic looks back with pride
Sean Lester had just closed his eyes when it struck. The massive magnitude-7.8 earthquake tossed him out of his bed at his North Canterbury home and sent him running to check on his sleeping children.
Within 90 minutes, he was stepping out of a helicopter in a dark, dazed and damaged Kaikoura.
“Before I left, I said to my wife, ‘I’ll see you at some stage’,” said the St John territory manager for North Canterbury, whose patch runs from the Waimakariri to Clarence Rivers.
The adrenalin of the response felt eerily familiar. Just five years earlier, he’d been working in the Christchurch CBD when the deadly February 22 quake struck.
Lester spent hours amid the chaos, smoke and rubble of the pancaked Canterbury Television Building where 115 people lost their lives.
The experience prepared him for what to expect on the ground in Kaikoura in those first hours when phone lines were down and information was limited: lots of aftershocks.
“I was expecting them and when they came I was ready for them,” he said yesterday, a year after the quake that claimed two lives.
Lester helped to establish an oper- ating base at Kaikoura Hospital and asked for a 48-hour roster to be drawn up from local volunteers.
“We had a great response from our local volunteers who, while they may have suffered damage to their homes and lives, their natural response was to help people,” he said.
St John staff were called to the collapsed Elms homestead outside Kaikoura where 74-year-old Louis Edgar was killed. He and his wife, Pam, had been members of St John.
Fortunately, the number of casualties and injuries was low, Lester said, with most people suffering only cuts, scrapes and bruises.
In the peak hour between midnight and 1am, there were just 25 callouts across the entire Canterbury and Nelson regions.
It took many days for most people to come forward for medical help, which Lester said was often the case.
“People have the mindset that there’ll be people worse off than them and they worry about tying up the emergency services. Often our business-as-usual workload drops off in that type of situation.”
Staff soon turned to providing welfare support to the population, helping vulnerable people and ensuring they had a presence in the main centres where people were gathering.
That night, after more than 20 straight hours, Lester tried to snatch a nap. But the constant sound of helicopters amid aftershocks meant he soon gave up.
A year on, he looks back with pride at the work his people did in such trying conditions.
“The way everyone came together, people forgetting any differences they might’ve had, to work together for each other was really special.”