Hotel heroes:

Help Is On The Way, a documentary about the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, relives the dramatic Hotel Grand Chancellor rescue. Kerry Harvey reports.

Documentary relives events of the dramatic Christchurch earthquake hotel rescue.

When Sergeant Dave Harvey realised several people were trapped in the Hotel Grand Chancellor after the devastating February 22, 2011 Christchurch earthquake, he didn’t muck around.

He picked up a can of the spray paint that police use at crash scenes and wrote a message on the road.

That message was “Help is on the way” and it seems fitting that is also the name of a new documentary about the rescue that followed.

Harvey says he wrote the message “so people would know something was happening”.

At the time, the Hotel Grand Chancellor rescue was hailed as one of the few good-news stories to come out of the tragedy that killed 185 people and injured thousands more. Harvey and some of his fellow rescuers appeared on the television current affairs show Close Up a few weeks after it happened but, other than that, little has been known publicly about the rescue.

“Not taking away from the fact there were many people who lost family members and loved ones, this was a story that had a happy ending,” he says.

Help Is On The Way comes from the same production team that made Finding Jeremy, which followed New Zealanders Andy and Amber Cleverley – who were among those trapped in the hotel – as they searched for a fellow survivor, an American man they knew only as Jeremy.

The four-star, 26-storey Hotel Grand Chancellor, built in 1986, was one of the tallest buildings in the city. Although it survived the first earthquake in September 2010

and continued operation without any known structural damage, the second magnitude 6.3 quake damaged it irreparably.

As photos of the building listing scarily to one side were beamed around the world in the hours after the quake, Harvey and his team were scrambling to find a way of saving the survivors before the hotel collapsed further.

“We could see it moving and we were getting the aftershocks. We had one big aftershock where a massive big crack opened up in the road then closed again,” the now-retired police sergeant says.

“She leaned over quite a bit then. The whole thing was groaning. The noise was indescribable.”

Harvey was first alerted to the fact there were people trapped on the hotel’s upper floors by survivors fleeing to Hagley Park to escape the earthquake-ravaged city centre.

When he arrived at the hotel, he encountered Fletcher Construction engineer Graham Hahn, who had been overseeing staff working on the hotel since the earlier September earthquake.

Harvey, Hahn and other rescuers combined forces to help the stranded hotel guests and staff make their way down from the top of the hotel to the car-park level.

“We had a job to do and it is fair to say we weren’t leaving there until we got those people out,” he says.

“I say ‘we’ because it was a team effort and we were all very focused on getting those people out of the building and safely on the ground.

“It was a very humbling experience for me in terms of what other people did in the face of pretty extreme adversity.”

The Fire Service arrived first but its ladders were too short to reach the survivors so the rescuers had to come up with another plan.

“People were talking about helicopters but we were concerned because of the glass and other things that were around and also the fact the helicopter was limited in how many people it could take each time and, also, getting people up to the very top (of the building) wasn’t considered an option,” Harvey says.

The decision was then made to use a crane and a man cage and Christchurch company Smith Cranes came up with the goods.

At that stage, the rescuers didn’t know how many people were trapped in the building.

“We didn’t really have any idea until the first eight or 10 – however many we got into that first man cage – came down and they told us,” he says, adding even after all known survivors – 36 of them – were back on the ground, there was concern someone could have been missed.

“And as it turned out there was a couple who had taken some sleeping medication apparently and they came out later. That was bizarre. They were closer to the ground but they apparently slept through it all.”

“It was a very humbling experience for me in terms of what other people did in the face of pretty extreme adversity.” – Dave Harvey