No decade like it for Canterbury
Christchurch is by world standards a small city. But it had a massive decade. The Press reporter and columnist Martin Van Beynen reviews the biggest news stories of the past decade in Christchurch and Canterbury.
The past decade has been one of the most momentous in Canterbury’s European history. Canterbury used to be the place where nothing much happened. Its population was steady, traditional and less transient than the rest of the country. Its hinterland was flat, its city orderly in an English way.
Then things changed. It seemed at times as if Canterbury had angered the gods and been singled out for more than its fair share of misery and upheaval.
The decade was book-ended by calamities.
The first was an earthquake on September 4, 2010. Centred in Darfield, it shook the city awake at 4.35am with a 7.1-magnitude rumble that lasted about 40 seconds.
Dawn gave clarity to the damage. Railway tracks were twisted, sections split, roads cracked, power was cut, houses were mangled and buildings left cracked and dangerous. Residents realised what liquefaction meant as they shovelled truckloads of sand, spewed up from the ground, off their gardens and sections.
Two people were seriously injured, one by a falling chimney and another by glass, but miraculously no-one was killed, thanks partly to the shake’s timing.
In the Hornby coolstores and supermarket distribution centres, nine-metre-high racking loaded with heavy goods such as alcohol collapsed but no-one was working. Rubble fell on the street in the city centre, but no-one was about. Only one fire broke out and no-one was trapped.
Canterbury, in its first week after the tremor, rallied quickly.
A week after one of the biggest jolts to strike a modern, populated city anywhere in the world, Canterbury authorities had managed to restore most of the services usually taken for granted.
The airport was back in action within hours and the Port of Lyttelton was working the next day, despite up to $50 million of damage to wharves and storage areas.
Supermarkets quickly cleaned up aisles crammed with broken glass and debris and opened their doors. After some panic shopping, people realised starvation was unlikely and things returned to normal.
As expected, Canterbury people pitched in and did what they could for themselves and their neighbours and friends. By Wednesday, the chooks had started
laying again and by Thursday some schools had reopened.
Some major historic buildings held up well. The iconic Christ Church Cathedral and the Catholic Basilica, both recently strengthened, survived intact, as did the Canterbury Museum and the Provincial Chambers. The Arts Centre sustained some expensive and serious damage but coped reasonably well.
But there were casualties – the Holy Trinity Anglican Church, the oldest stone Church in Canterbury, and the Durham St Methodist Mission, the oldest stone church in Christchurch, the Repertory Theatre in Kilmore St and the Memorial Hall (1929) at Lincoln University.
The city’s red brick architecture, much of it built between 1880 and the Depression, got a hiding. The high brick tower of the former Christchurch Railway Station in Moorhouse Ave was badly cracked under its clock.
By the end of the week, brick shops and restaurants were coming down. People wept as their businesses crumbled under the sweep of the excavator’s hard arm.
For Cantabrians, whether they suffered damage or not, the earthquake of September 4 was a shattering experience. A once-ina-lifetime event, never to be forgotten.
In that feeling – a disaster survived, overcome and not to be repeated – lay the seeds of the death toll caused by an even more devastating event.
At 12.51pm on February 22, an aftershock, centred in Lyttelton and reaching magnitude 6.3, cut a destructive path through the city. This time people were in the streets, in their cars and at their desks. The quake was half the depth of the September shake, vertical and horizontal movement was simultaneous and the force of the shaking was extreme.
People died in collapsed buildings weakened by the shake in September. The red brick frontages, which softened the hard look of Christchurch, crashed down, killing more. The aftershock would claim a toll of 185 lives. The fact it could have been much higher was not much consolation.
The collapse of two buildings caused most of the fatalities. In Madras St, the Canterbury Television Building (CTV), built in 1986, pancaked, killing 115 people, many of them on the third floor. On Cambridge Tce, 18 people died in PGC House. A brick facade that collapsed on a bus in Colombo St killed eight people.
Many were trapped and injured. The earthquake left three paraplegics and numerous amputees. Others would take years to recover from their injuries.
The emergency department of Christchurch Hospital treated 231 patients within an hour of the earthquake and had 20 trauma teams working. A field hospital providing 75 beds was set up in the badly affected eastern suburbs on February 24.
After the first few days, with aftershocks continuing, the thrust of the rescue effort moved from determined searches for survivors to recovering more of the bodies of those killed.
Miraculous survival stories emerged.
Nilgun Kulpe, a relationship counsellor from Purau, was meeting with nine colleagues who worked on the fifth floor of the CTV building. One of her colleagues had her 8-month-old baby with her.
‘‘The baby was crawling around. Suddenly there was a shock and everything collapsed and fell. We dropped like we were in an elevator. The noise was huge. Everything smashing, cracking, falling.’’
After the drop, the way out was blocked but then they looked up to see open sky.
‘‘I knew then we were safe. I looked out and saw we were only a few metres from the ground. It is a total miracle. When I looked at the building I wondered how anybody could have survived, ‘‘ she said.
But as shock turned to mourning and miraculous survival stories to biographies of the dead, relief at the survival of loved ones was replaced by the daily reality of life in a broken city.
The central city was a no-go area and thousands of businesses shut. The September earthquake was estimated to have inflicted about
$4 billion damage but February’s shock dwarfed that, with damage in the tens of billions.
The eastern suburbs, particularly parts of Dallington, Avonside, New Brighton and Burwood near the Avon River were hit badly again and would eventually be red zones, abandoned as housing areas. The February quake added the hill suburbs of Mt Pleasant, Cashmere, Moncks Spur and Redcliffs to the toll.
Essential services like power and water were in serious strife. About half the city had its reticulated water supply restored in four days but the crippled pipe network and pumping stations would need extensive repairs. The city’s rivers turned into open sewers as the wastewater treatment plant in Bromley, receiving only 20 per cent of its usual intake, spluttered.
The February earthquake did not spare the city’s icons. The Press building and the Catholic Basilica in Barbadoes St were terminally damaged and Christ Church Cathedral appeared doomed until a public outcry ensured its survival.
The historic Provincial Chambers were wrecked and the beautiful buildings of Christ’s College near Hagley Park were severely damaged.
The sound of demolition machinery and the dust of smashed buildings would drift through the city’s air for years. By the start of
2015, 1240 buildings within the four avenues had been demolished.
International assistance arrived soon after the earthquake. A contingent of 323 Australian police landed and teams of search and rescue experts came from Australia, the United States, Japan, Taiwan, China and Singapore.
In March, the Government established the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission to report on the causes of building collapses and the adequacy of the building code. The Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority was announced in the same month.
The city began to rebuild with the dominant theme being delays, fights with insurance companies and slow progress towards a new city.
For the next five years the earth was relatively quiet. That changed at midnight on November 14, 2016, when a magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit the top of the South Island, starting near the rural settlement of Culverden and centred 60km southwest of the tourist town of Kaiko¯ ura.
Two people died, a man in Kaiko¯ ura and a woman in Mt Lyford, and about 900 people were evacuated by navy vessels. The Kaiko¯ ura coastline was lifted by about a metre.
The earthquake had a major impact on Canterbury, especially its east coast transport links.
State Highway 1 between Picton and Waipara was closed, as was the Inland Rd (Route 70) and the Main North Line railway. The diversion route over other state highways was a slow trip for motorists because of the volumes of traffic.
The Inland Rd was not reopened to all traffic until December 19, 2016. The highway north of Kaiko¯ ura opened a year later, in December 2017.
The complete railway from Picton to Christchurch was not restored until September 15, 2017, and the passenger service did not resume until December 1, 2018.
Quakes weren’t the end of the trials for Canterbury residents, however.
On February 13, 2017, huge black clouds of smoke appeared to the south of Christchurch. The Port Hills fire had started.
The threat it posed to a city’s residential areas and its scale and ferocity were unprecedented in New Zealand.
The fire started in Early Valley Rd in Halswell, joined with another blaze near the Sign of the Kiwi about 6pm and raged out of control for three days, saving its worst for
February 15 when most of the damage was done.
It claimed nine homes, damaged another five and ranged over 1660 hectares. Many hectares of regenerating native bush were destroyed. Fourteen helicopters and more than 100 appliances and water tankers were deployed.
Although no residents or firefighters were hurt, helicopter pilot Steve Askin, a decorated former SAS soldier and father of two, died when his fire-fighting helicopter crashed near the Sugar Loaf communications mast.
A review released in November found flaws in the way the fire was managed and pointed to failures to keep the public properly informed.
The various agencies operated under different plans and command and control structures, and difficulties were compounded by different incident management terminology across the fire services and the wider emergency sector agencies.
After the fire, in a move planned earlier, urban and rural firefighters from 38 fire agencies were merged into Fire and Emergency New Zealand, a single agency operated under one piece of legislation.
Before the decade was over, Christchurch was again at the centre of international attention, not for a natural disaster but for a man-made calamity.
On March 15, 2019, at 1.40pm, a
28-year-old Australian loner, who believed the west was being corrupted by immigrants, opened fire on worshippers at the Al Noor mosque in Deans Ave.
The shooter ensured the world could watch the massacre by livestreaming his rampage on Facebook. Of those shot at Al Noor,
44 would die.
The shooter then drove to the Linwood Islamic Centre, where he killed another seven worshippers about 1.55pm. His car was shunted off the road shortly afterwards and he was pulled from his car and arrested by two country police officers on a course in Christchurch.
The toll from his deadly afternoon was 51 people killed and
49 people injured. The dead included 34 spouses and many had children, one only a week old.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said it was one of New Zealand’s ‘‘darkest days’’.
‘‘This was an act of extraordinary and unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand. Many of the people affected by this act of extreme violence will be from our refugee and migrant communities. New Zealand is their home. They are us. The person or people who carried out this act of unprecedented violence are not. There is no place in our home for them.’’
The gunman was charged with murdering 51 people, attempting to murder 40 and engaging in a terrorist act. His trial is expected to start on June 2.
An outpouring of support and sympathy occurred after the mosque shootings. People laid flowers outside the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch and attended vigils.
One week after the attacks, an open-air call to prayer was held in Hagley Park and broadcast nationally on radio and television.
A national remembrance service was held on March 29, a fortnight after the attacks.
The public, organisations and businesses donated generously to help survivors and victims of the mosque attacks.
Victim Support raised $10m before closing its Givealittle page and the NZ Islamic Information Centre set up a LaunchGood page, raising $2.7m. Donations overseen by the Our People, Our City fund reached about $10m and the Jewish community in Pittsburgh in the United States gave $1.1m.
Some members of the Muslim community believed the money was being spread too thinly and should have gone to the worst affected, including those traumatised mentally but not physically.
King Salman of Saudi Arabia invited about 200 survivors and victims’ relatives to Mecca and Medina for the August Hajj as his guests.
In June, new regulations under the Arms Act prohibited most semi-automatic rifles and shotguns and related parts, and highcapacity magazines. The Government declared an amnesty until December 20 for people to hand in the newly prohibited firearms and accessories and other illegally held firearms.
A gun buyback scheme was expected to cost about $208m. By December 16, 47,000 firearms had been collected and $73m spent.
On May 15, Ardern was in Paris to chair a summit, known as the Christchurch Call, co-launched with French President Emmanuel Macron, to tackle terrorism on social media.
Seventeen governments and a raft of tech companies – including Google, Facebook and Twitter – signed a pledge to formulate new rules and systems to eliminate violent extremism online.
Just ahead of the Paris meeting, Facebook announced it would be changing the rules around its livestreaming service, handing out
30-day bans for livestreaming after a single serious rule violation on the platform.
The Government put in place new immigration arrangements for people directly affected by the shootings and living primarily in New Zealand on March 15. The Christchurch Response (2019) Category allowed applicants to be granted permanent residency if requirements, including health and character, were met.
A royal commission to investigate the attacks in Christchurch started work on April 10. Its purpose was to look at what all relevant agencies knew or could or should have known about the gunman and his activities, including his access to weapons. Whether they could have been in a position to prevent the attack would be examined.
Supreme Court judge Justice Sir William Young was appointed chairman. The commission has met with New Zealand security agencies and also travelled to the UK to meet spy agencies, MI5 and the Government Communications Headquarters.
After a decade marked by earthquakes, a devastating fire and a horrible massacre of innocents, the city was not out of the woods.
On July 19, an explosion shook the city. It was centred in a house in Northwood where the occupiers had been having trouble with a gas fire. A gas contractor had worked on the fire the day before.
Six people were injured, two critically, in the explosion, which caused a blast that registered as a
magnitude-2 earthquake. Emergency workers were amazed they were not dealing with multiple fatalities.
The blast destroyed the house, rendered several other houses uninhabitable and damaged scores. It flung debris across the neighbourhood and the blast wave sucked windows from houses and buckled garage doors.
An investigation into the explosion has yet to be completed.
The past five months have been quiet in Christchurch. It would be tempting fate to say the city and Canterbury had had enough calamity for decades to come.
Canterbury continues to rebuild but Christchurch’s reputation as a steady, unexciting city has gone.
The legacy of the decade could be that Christchurch has earned a reputation as a city where only bad things happen. It should, however, be known as a city where anything can happen.