Stunned by city’s quake horror
INSIDE: How the earthquake has affected Southland. MONDAY: Invercargill City Council’s building regulations manager Simon Tonkin details the changes introduced since February 22. TUESDAY: What lessons have Southland’s emergency management team learned fro
The beginning of an earthquake is an uncanny sensation; it registers in the pit of your stomach, like your internal spiritlevel – your sense of balance – is thrown out. Then you become aware this is not you, everything is moving. If you are lucky it doesn’t get any worse, if hell breaks loose.
I write this some 17,000 kilometres away from Christchurch and Invercargill, in the geologically stable Kiev, Ukraine, but one Friday, about 8pm, in a below street-level bar, that feeling returned.
It starts with ripples on the top
not, all of my pint, followed by rumbling and vibration. My colleagues take a while to register. It becomes clearer when wide-eyed and whiteknuckled, I utter the word that has passed the lips of Cantabrians too many times in the past 18 months.
‘‘Earthquake?’’ A workmate provides an answer. ‘‘It’s the Metro,’’ she says. ‘‘Here we are right above the tunnel for blue line . . . it’s a train.’’ I’m embarrassed.
At that moment I realise the ghosts of February 22 and its aftermath, have lingered longer than I thought.
February 22, 2011, 12.51pm.
I’m contemplating lunch as I make small-talk with Jenny Partridge – a receptionist at Invercargill police. In hindsight I guess it could have been up to one minute after Christchurch was brought to its knees that our third floor newsroom starts gently swaying. ‘‘Earthquake,’’ Partridge says. Simultaneously, that nauseous feeling hits me, I glance up to see the lights swinging.
I nod to my colleague Sam Mcknight; he too looks skyward before his journalistic instincts kick in. The first question is simple. ‘‘Where was it?’’
The answer comes down the phone.
‘‘Look Blossom [Partridge calls everyone ‘Blossom’] it’s Christchurch, it’s massive, the system is going crazy, I have to go.’’ Click . . . beep, beep, beep . . . On the newsroom TVS we, like the rest of the country, are confronted with images the likes of which we have never seen before on our soil.
We watch, stunned and ashenfaced as the horror unfolds.
However, I would be lying if I told you there wasn’t excitement. The ‘‘big stories’’ are one of the reasons we go into the job. There is a buzz as we gather information, make sense of it and translate it into words.
And yet, sometimes, the subject matter of that ‘‘big story’’ is distressing and that excitement seems out of place and at odds with the reality of the event.
Mcknight, chief photographer Robyn Edie and I are mobilised to go to Christchurch within maybe 90 minutes. In the clothes we wore to work, with hastily packed bags, we leave filled with that feeling of excitement, tempered with some apprehension. Flying in a four- seater aircraft in bad weather and, including a point where the engines stopped somewhere off the coast of Temuka, it’s fair to say we are happy to land in Ashburton where we pick up a rental car and make our way to Christchurch.
The first thing we notice is we are travelling counter to traffic; save us and some police cars heading north, every other vehicle is travelling in the opposite direction.
In fading light we arrive in the city, for me at least, the pockets of devastation we see in that short window of time do not register. I want to get to work.
After a short trip into what is yet to become the red zone, we receive our first assignment. Christchurch is days out from hosting the Ellerslie International Flower Show, but as we are told, the huge marquees in Hagley Park have been commandeered to house displaced people.
Entering the tent is the first psychological shock, but in the days that follow they become as regular as the aftershocks that rock the ground.
It’s confronting. A sea of people, some playing cards, some lying in sleeping bags, some look fine, others have a far-away stare. These are quake refugees, hundreds of them, this is their camp and they are packed in like sardines. We gather some comments from the mostly tourist residents, snap some photos and leave to file the story, the first of many we file in the coming days.
And still the ground is moving. While nothing like the violent 6.3, the aftershocks are regular and even jolt us in the Rangiora motel that provides our beds for the night.
The next day we hit the trembling ground running.
Contrary to the structure of a newsroom, we are largely left to our own initiative in terms of news gathering.
For Mcknight and Edie, this provides an opportunity – courtesy of an intervention by newsreader Simon Dallow.
We decide to join the media throng around a bus, at the Christchurch Art Gallery where Civil Defence has set up its co-ordination centre.
While we have no idea what the bus is for, it seems like the best opportunity to get closer to the centre of a city in lockdown.
The catch? The bus is full and the last of its passengers is boarding.
‘‘What about these guys?’’ The question comes from Dallow. ‘‘We can take two,’’ the woman shepherding passengers says.
‘‘Go, I’ll wait,’’ I tell Mcknight and Edie.
It becomes a defining moment for the pair. They become the reporter and photographer who capture the rescue of one of the last people to be pulled alive from the rubble of Christchurch’s CBD.
Ironically, she is former Southlander Ann Bodkin, extracted from the collapsed Pyne Gould Corporation 26 hours after the quake.
Where Mcknight and Edie capture a moment of survival, my stories in the days that follow are about death.
As a police reporter, I’m used to it. I see writing about the life and tragic death of a person – it’s always tragic – as a way of humanising them, taking them beyond a statistic, showing who they were and highlighting the gap they have left in loved ones’ lives.
You share the grief; despite it being with people you don’t know and that emotion is attached to someone you will never know. I remember all of them – in seven years of reporting it is a long list.
I’m used to it, so it seems logical I do this here – it’s my job.
The names are released by police in a trickle – four initially, followed by handfuls in the days that follow. I trace the relatives, make the phone calls and arrange to meet them. I’m used to it. Then, at a funeral, one of the first of many to be held in and around Christchurch in the coming days and weeks, I broke.
‘‘Hi Jared,’’ she says, the greeting followed by a hug. ‘‘Are you OK?’’
I will never forget it. Amy Cooney was about to say goodbye to her brother, Jaime Gilbert, a week to the day after the pair ran from the tumbling Iconic Bar in Manchester St. The pair were buried under rubble, hand in hand. Cooney came to in time to feel her brother slip away.
She had already endured so much and on this day my welfare should have been an afterthought.
It is hard to describe how this has affected me, which is frustrating as a writer. I can only say it has. This and a second incident haunt me.
It seems almost egotistical to attach importance to recording an event, to being a messenger, especially when Christchurch was full of genuine heroes both sung and unsung following the 6.3 quake, but after almost three weeks I have to leave – I’m reluctant because I believe I still have work to do.
That work includes the second incident which happens on my last day in Christchurch.
Maybe it was based on the stories I had already written about the dead, but the request is simple enough.
Rachel Styant, wife of Michael Styant who died in the collapse of the Pyne Gould Corporation, emails a photo of her husband and dad of their four children because she is ‘‘sick of looking at a silhouette’’ on stuff.co.nz. She asks if I will write about him. It is a request I cannot fulfil, with a plane to catch back to Invercargill. I give her the contact details of another reporter and leave.
I feel guilty, because as far as I know that story remains unwritten.
I think it should have been.