Strength born of adversity and faith

MICHAEL FOX

Last updated 05:00 05/03/2011

 

Peter McDonald knows how badly his city is damaged and admits he's daunted by the mammoth task to rebuild it.

But Annette Purvis has seen the way Cantabrians and Kiwis have responded to the crisis and knows it can be done.

Christchurch is on its knees after the devastating February 22 quake.

Much of the city and thousands of homes are condemned and vital infrastructure is severely damaged. Authorities say it could be five years before the rubble is cleared, such is the scale of the carnage.

"I think everyone was just starting to sort of think that `maybe we're over the hump, we're getting out of the danger zone' and I think that's probably what's affected people most is the timing of it.

"[Just] when everyone thought things were coming up, we've just been cut down in a major way.

"And not only are we back down to square one, we've gone past square one and we're minus three," McDonald said.

More than 130 people are working out of emergency operations centre at the Christchurch Art Gallery, where they are expected to remain for another two weeks.

They are tasked with co-ordinating the relief and recovery operation and preparing the city to move forward.

Employed in the Christchurch City Council's rebuild and recovery team from the first quake, McDonald is now an operations manager responsible for silt removal and for getting vital water and waste services working again.

After working so hard to get the city back on track after the first quake, he admits to "a certain amount of frustration, depression" at being dealt such a severe second blow.

"The things that we worked for, strived for, to keep the city running and keep things operating and do our best for the people of Christchurch, I guess, it's suddenly been decimated."

The damage was extraordinary and their best efforts were being swallowed up.

"We're only just starting to scratch the surface – just the fact that we've already moved 180,000 tons of silt, and that's not the end of it.

"In the first earthquake we probably moved 30 (thousand tons) so you can probably make a reasonable comparison out of that."

The rebuilding task was "absolutely" daunting, he said. "Every time I go out and look around, it's like, still, where are we going to get started?

"Where we're at at the moment is still the initial response and that's going to take some time yet.

"But certainly we're going to have to turn our minds to how we're going to fix this."

ScaleEmergency operations centre manager Murray Sinclair, who was at an emergency management conference in Wellington when the quake hit, said even after watching television news footage while waiting at the airport, it took three days for the scale of the quake to hit.

He arrived in Christchurch that night to scenes of ruin and staff in shock.

"I don't think people have got an appreciation of the scale of this event. Even seeing bits on TV, connecting all the dots together, the buildings are destroyed, the infrastructure, the process for recovery. We're talking about the infrastructure from September taking two years to get going. Well, this is far worse than September was."

The recovery process would take about five years, he said. People knew it was a long-term thing and were self-managing and not working themselves into the ground as in September, he said.

Others had given up on the city, too fearful to stay on. Anxious after September, they had been tipped over the edge by the latest quake.

For council employees, whose job it was to make Christchurch work, it was tough to see the city humbled.

"People get passionate about their work and to have it impacted so severely, certainly impacts on them.

"But give them credit, most of the staff realise that we'll go through a grieving process and then we've got to get up and look forward to rebuilding the city."

For Christchurch City Council's building evaluation manager Steve McCarthy, the feeling is the same.

"We've worked pretty hard since September to get things set up and operating right and we were on the threshold of starting to rebuild the city ... we were on the cusp of a big rebuild and it sort of seemed achievable.

"The Boxing Day quake put us back a wee bit, but we were OK, we could cope.

"Then we ended up in the situation where this one is many times worse than the September one and it's just an even bigger, enormous task."

Pressure from the public was starting to build and there was a focus on demolishing as many of the unsafe buildings during the state of emergency as possible.

If critically damaged buildings were not sorted by then, it would further immobilise the city, he said.

Engineers were busy carrying out about 11,000 inspections a day to assess the safety of homes and buildings.

In the immediate aftermath of the quake they had up to 90 building inspectors in the CBD alone. About 50,000 homes were to have been inspected by Thursday night.

All the data was recorded and mapped so they knew the status of all the properties that had been assessed.

While the scale of damage in September was astounding, the destruction of the latest quake was much worse.

"This time the damage to the commercial buildings is just extreme and it's to the modern building stock as well.

The standards that we designed to were exceeded by this earthquake. In September they weren't.

"The scale of the devastation is just enormous. I just feel sad for the businesses and for the people. People's lives have been destroyed by this, you know."

Working in the welfare team, Annette Purvis understands how bad things are but knows it can be done.

"We're all in here for the city. It's not spoken about, but it's almost that shoulder-to-shoulder type thing. I don't think anyone ever questions why we're here," she said.

People wanted to help and being council employees, felt compelled to make something right.

"Leaving the city, I spoke to a friend of mine this morning and it just wouldn't occur to her, wouldn't occur to me, to go. A lot of it's still here and the people are still here, the Port Hills are still here.

"We can fix buildings. It's just a shame that we had to lose people.

"Have faith and believe. You don't become strong without adversity. It's part of life isn't it. S... happens. It's how you go on that counts."