Home destroyed by quake – then fire
Did firefighters pull out too soon? What’s up at Civil Defence? And when can residents go home? The answers can’t come fast enough. By Adam Dudding.
The steam was still rising from the ground in Christchurch’s Port Hills yesterday, as firefighters sprayed water and dumped flame retardant along the border between burnt and unburnt.
Priorities were swiftly shifting from the urgent (Run for your life!) to the merely seriously pressing (Please can we get back through the cordons?).
And next, barring any new flareups, attention will turn fully to the concerns that could only be addressed in passing during this past half-week of destruction, death and more than a little chaos: what went wrong?
On Thursday February 9, just 10 days ago, a total fire ban for Christchurch and Banks Peninsula was announced by the council. The Port Hills, the rocky tussocky range to the south of the city, were looking ‘‘very brown’’, said principal rural fire officer Darrin Woods.
Four days later, his fears were realised – twice. Early Monday evening, firefighters were called to a hill of burning scrub and long grass in Early Valley Rd. One of them was Omar Yusaf, who told Sunday Star-Times that though he and his colleagues has been dealing with these types of fires for years, ‘‘this one developed into something absolutely massive’’.
Something else Yusaf said , though, was curious. When darkness fell he and his colleagues from the central Christchurch station were stood down, at a time when the fire had been contained but not yet extinguished. He was told there wouldn’t be any more firefighting that night, a situation he said he found unusual and ‘‘frustrating’’. In time he wouldn’t be the only one questioning that decision.
Meanwhile, in the Marley Hill area of the Port Hills, another, smaller fire, ignited around 7pm the same day. What happened next has been rolling front-page fodder.
The Early Valley Rd grew back out of control and firefighters returned. Both fires grew and changed direction following the vagaries of both the Cantabrian winds and the currents created by the fires themselves. A crisis was becoming a disaster.
The first house burnt down late on Monday, and others were evacuated. By Tuesday 120 firefighters and 11 helicopters were fighting fires that had burnt around 600ha, and the fires claimed their first victim: David Askin, a former SAS soldier piloting a helicopter who crashed during a monsoon-bucket flight.
By Wednesday the burnt area was 1000ha; evacuations accelerated and a state of emergency was declared.
By Thursday the fires had merged and expanded, the burnthouses toll reached 11 and 400 households had been evacuated. By Friday morning the fires were ‘‘contained but not controlled’’. Schools and kindys were still shut, and residents cordoned out of their homes, but the worst of it, it seems, is just about over.
Yet alongside the timeline of the fire itself ran a parallel story of confusion, misinformation and conflict.
There’s the vexed question of why those firefighters were taken off the job on Monday night, only to race back 90 minutes later when the flames took off again. In a move that suggested friction between rural, urban and volunteer firefighting factions, Professional Firefighters Union secretary Derek Best has called for an independent inquiry into the decision, which he said left career firefighters ‘‘frustrated, bewildered and disappointed’’, as they believed 10 homes could have been saved.
Just as concerning are the misstep by Civil Defence. When Wednesday’s state of emergency was declared, Civil Defence minister Gerry Brownlee was ‘‘perplexed’’ that it took so long.
Civil Defence announced 30-40 houses had burnt down before correcting the figure to 11. On Thursday night a Civil Defence Facebook post told some residents they could go home, but they were turned away at the cordon.
At a public meeting yesterday, residents still barred from their homes unleashed their anger while officials went on the defence. Christchurch Civil Defence controller John Mackie said he relied on fire services to tell him about the cordons, because this was not his ‘‘day job’’. Fire response coordinator Richard McNamara said there was no way that the houses that burnt down on Monday night could have been saved.
This is always the way when disaster strikes: there’s the initial horror, then the gratitude to firstresponders, then anger at systemic flaws that made things harder than they might have been.
Early on, it’s always hard to separate the noise from the signal. Was the brief stand-down of helicopters after David Askin’s crash too long (or too short)? Was an emergency declared too late, and did it really matter? Was the 90-minute pause in firefighting that baffled Omar Yusaf a terrible blunder, or a reasonable decision in the heat of the moment?
Six days after the spark that would engulf the hills, we’re still in a nearly fact-free zone. But that can’t last: the time will come for the answers, and it needs to be soon. Additional reporting by and Henry Cooke Nikki Macdonald A Christchurch man who has lost everything for the second time in six short years is exhausted.
The devastating Port Hills blaze crept up to within metres of James Frost’s Worsley Rd rental home, caused severe smoke damage and took out the garage with everything in it.
He was left with just the clothes he was wearing and his passport. It was unclear what would be salvageable from inside the smoke-damaged house.
Although the home Frost and his partner rented was still upright, the fire had singed the fringes of the property and he doubted it would still be habitable.
The 38-year-old struggled to get through the fire cordon yesterday to visit it. I see myself as blessed, you just have to get on with life.
This is the second time that natural disaster has ruined his home. His Merivale unit collapsed in the 2011 earthquakes, but he said the heartache this time around was ‘‘far more devastating’’.
He said a bad feeling on Wednesday morning had been the final push to sign off on the insurance paperwork, just hours before the fire arrived on his doorstep.
‘‘We’ve really lost a lot of things we love, and we’re just stuck in no man’s land,’’ Frost said.
‘‘It’s touch and go if we will be able to get back into the house, the smoke has got in through a smashed window and all our things are all damaged.
‘‘A big bulldozer has gone right around the house, and the flames reached the courtyard so you can see how hard the firefighters must have worked to keep the fire back which we really appreciate ... there are big bonuses, but it’s still so hard.’’
He left for Australia just a week after the 2011 quake, where he worked for a disability organisation, before moving back last July.
Frost had lived in Nelson up until four weeks ago, and said he came back thinking the worst was over for the city.
It meant a lot to be back in Christchurch, he said. ‘‘It’s home.’’ Despite everything, Frost said he feels lucky for the little he has left.
‘‘I see myself as blessed, you just have to get on with life.
‘‘It’s really tiring and there’s so much emotion that there is just no chance to sit down and take it all in’’.