my life

I’m still trying to get over the gravity of that statement. It seems so unreal, even to me now, a week since it all happened. I was sitting in a park today, closing my eyes and thinking about the poor folk who didn’t make it out alive. It seems hard to believe that I was there, in the midst of it, just 1 week ago today.

At 12:44 on February 22 2011 I was sitting in my office in Sumner and tweeted the 3 words “Movement and timing“. I had felt uneasy all day. Sometimes you just feel like something is wrong and you can’t put your finger on it. Was I hungry? Not enough sleep? I just felt uneasy.

At 12:51, just 6 minutes later, an earthquake hit the city of Christchurch, with its epicentre in Lytleton, which lies around 6 kilometres from Sumner.

Simon and I were discussing how to best display Flash within SimpleCMS before the page has fully loaded – you know, a really meaningful conversation about something that really matters – all of a sudden the building started violently shaking. What felt like a split second and at the same time a lifetime, we were both clambering onto and over each other, running out of the door as office furniture came crashing down around us. Running is normally quite an easy thing to do, but if you’ve ever tried to run on a bouncy castle you’ll know how much harder it is when the stuff you’re trying to run on doesn’t want to play along nicely.

We managed to get outside and witness large pieces of metal falling down from the roof above our office – without hesitation (or rational thought) I did the only thing anyone would do in a situation like that: I called my Mum.

There are two reasons why I called my Mum: one being that it’s sort of thing that we all tend to do; the whole ‘chicken soup’ thing. Mum’s are traditionally the person we run to when things go wrong. Mums make things better. The second reason being that I know how much of a worrier my Mum is. “If she’s watching the news“, I think to myself “and she sees that there’s been an earthquake in the place where her son lives, she’s going to be really worried“.

Turns out that she knew nothing about it! Not surprising really, why would she when it had literally happened about 1 minute before I called her? That would be some fast reporting right there. From Christchurch to Hull (sorry, Mum, Beverley!) via the medium of television in around a minute – that’s closer to magick than news reporting.

Anyway, I re-assured her that I was ok and she needn’t worry about me. Which worried her even more than if I hadn’t have bothered calling at all. Looking back, I remember a large piece of roof falling 5 metres away from where I was standing at the time of the call, and being quite close to where there were giant rocks falling down from the cliffs. So to say everything was ok at that moment in time wasn’t really telling the whole truth.

The village Sumner was blanketed in what Simon and I originally assumed was smoke from a fire somewhere. Again, when you actually think about it, no fire could have started that quickly for it to produce that amount of smoke, but our heads weren’t thinking rationally at the time. As we now know, it was actually red dust from a section of cliff face that fell onto the Returned Servicemen Association building (RSA), killing two men.

We ran around the corner to see what was going on – along with us, people were running everywhere looking bemused. I pulled out my phone and shot a short video of the rocks during which time an aftershock hit.

Movement and timing.

Having a 3G connection and being a budding film-maker/geek, I uploaded it to Youtube and tweeted the link to my modest amount of followers (who numbered around 120 if I remember correctly). Somehow it got picked up by the Twitter account @BreakingNews and as a result became one of the most viewed pieces of footage around the world that week.

Shown on the BBC, CNN and Sky News, on TV from Australia to God-knows-where-istan. My out-of-breath, half-generic-northern-half-Hull accent narrated the experience for the rest of the world to see. Simon making a cameo appearance toward the end with a well-timed ‘fuck‘ for all the children watching.

We decided it was time to move; given that the normally distant sea had edged towards us and that a lot of people were tweeting to me about an impending tsunami. We needed to find Amy; Simon’s fiancee, who worked at Redcliffs School as a support teacher.

We managed to bust the door down on the office and grab the car keys off my desk. Simon pointed out that whilst his side of the room looked like a bomb had hit it, with monitors and printers everywhere, my side was just as I had left it – a mess as usual.

My desk arrangment finally looked like Simon’s!

It was an eery drive from Sumner to Redcliffs. One of the most striking things for me was that the iconic and instantly recognisable Shag Rock on the beach into Sumner had almost disappeared. Something that had been a noticeable feature of the area for Millennia had crumbled to nothing. You know it’s bad when even nature looks different, not just the man-made structures of the last century or so.

Even with the lack of traffic, the drive was a slow one; swerving around the many gaping wounds that the earth had recently acquired. A Posthaste van was sitting underneath the cliffs with its windscreen smashed and the offending boulder still sitting there – the unlucky, yet at the same time lucky, driver of the van was standing on the side of the road typing away on his mobile.

We arrived in Redcliffs to find a lot of worried parents picking their children up from the school. We picked our little one up and headed off for higher ground as people kept advising us to do. As it turns out, with the epicentre being in Lytleton, any tsunami that may have hit would have reached us almost instantly – that is of course if it was willing to climb the kilometre high hills to get to us. Being there, right there, at the time, we didn’t know what was going on so we did what we felt was the right thing to do – we headed up the hill.

When we arrived at my house the full extent of the thing hit. Whereas the previous earthquake had knocked our neighbour’s vase over because “these houses are built on solid volcanic rock” as I was often told. This cookie had taken out most of the houses down our street. There were a few bloodied people standing around with young children who seemed blissfully unaware that this was anything more than a new adventure. Amy did a great job of looking after some of the children whose parents were nowhere to be seen and at the same time playing with a worried-looking dog.

I went up the hill to survey the house. I was told by my neighbours that my little Piaggio Apé had been pushed over by the force of the impact so I knew before I saw the place that it wasn’t going to be pretty. That and the fact that the house below us (which had been bought only weeks before) looked like it was about to collapse at any time.

My fears were confirmed. The place I called home was a mess. I’d made an extra effort to tidy the place that morning before heading off to work too – trying to get that welded-on egg off the pan was my biggest waste of time that day.

Because of the non-stop aftershocks which kept coming and coming, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t willing to stay anywhere with anything solid above me; you know, ceilings that sort of thing.

I gabbed a couple of photographs, tents and my wind-up radio that Rachel bought me for my birthday and went back down the driveway to meet Simon and Amy. We drove up to the top of the hill, until we could go no further, and pulled into a place called ‘Gethsemene Gardens‘ – your guess as to what this place is now is as good as our guess was then. Whatever your guess was, I bet you it was wrong. What we found at Gethsemene Gardens was no less than an Ark.

Yep, as if the earth moving beneath us and the talked about impending floods weren’t enough – things just got a lot more biblical.

Now this wasn’t a boat, nor was it simply a building that vaguely looked like an Ark – it was a giant monster of an Ark that very much resembled something Noah would have been proud to have knocked about in. Complete with life-size brass animals, 2 of each kind. The view from the place was spectacular – eerily quite but amazing nonetheless. We could clearly make out the bellowing smoke rising from the centre of Christchurch and although we couldn’t turn on the TV due to the electricity being off, we knew that this was a big event. And we were part of it.

Bev and Ken were the proud owners of the Ark and the beautiful gardens adjacent to it, built by hand by her brother John over a number of years, this was a place where this old Christian couple hosted weddings. Inside was a chapel and even a bar. If we were lucky to escape the full wrath of the earthquake, we were even luckier to find an Noah’s Ark, at the top of a hill… with a bar.

The lovely couple offered us their caravan to stay in for the night and we gladly accepted their kind offer. It was raining by now and starting to get dark. We were all very tired so to have somewhere to stay that was solid enough to keep us warm but was not made of bricks was just what we needed.

As if they had earthquakes every day, Bev and Ken were prepared with candles and a toasty log fire and with my wind-up radio it all made for a real wartime experience.

She popped open a bottle of red wine and we all felt so safe in their living room which was essentially a large wooden shed with colourful sheets draped across the ceiling to keep the heat inside. She cooked us a meal of potatoes and cream with sweetcorn and beef. It all had to be eaten now that the fridge was without electricity. Every time an aftershock hit, depending on its force, we would either glance over, smile nervously and say something like “Did you feel that?” or if it was less of a rumbling build-up and more of a whack, we would all let out a collective “Woooooooaaahh” accompanied by some serious chair-clinging.

Listening to the radio brought home the severity of the event. People had died this time and we felt lucky to be where we were. That night the three of us, Simon, Amy and myself went to our little caravan and tried to get some rest. Turned out that I found this easier than the pair of them did. From my perspective, I was alive, I was safe and I had checked there was nothing above me that could be shaken enough to fall on me whilst sleeping. That and the day’s experience was enough to get me to sleep and snoring enough to ensure that Simon and Amy couldn’t. Sorry guys!

The aftershocks continued all night apparently. I say ‘apparently‘ because I only found this out when I was told about them in the morning. Whilst I had only woken momentarily to a large shudder, only to fall back asleep again, it turned out that Simon and Amy had enjoyed no more than an hour’s sleep.

The next day was spent helping to clean up in the Ark. In the dark. The Ark in the dark. Hulking giant brass camels around for the old couple was the least we could do for them. The pews were everywhere too and there was a good amount of glass around so we stuck on some gloves and got to work.

We ended up staying at the Ark with Bev and Ken for 4 nights in total, until we heard that the bridge which connected the village of Sumner to Christchurch city was open again. Simon and Amy wanted to find the quickest way to England and I didn’t blame them.

We drove across the city which resembled a war zone. Liquefaction distorting and warping my beautiful newly adopted city.

The army were out in force, patrolling the city and enforcing a curfew on its residents. Around 4 hours later, we made it to the other side – it was literally a tale of two cities, the West side having seemingly suffered no damage at all. A complete contrast to the September 2010 earthquake which really hammered this area.

We stayed the night with friends of mine, Mike and Susan, whom I had met through my Mum – he had lectured on Social Care in Hull a few months before and after Mum had told him that I was also living in Christchurch we made contact. They were both very warm and welcoming and after surviving on over-filled kettle water and melted ice for the past 5 days, having clean running water was something I will never take for granted again.

It was shower time and I was dirty!

But they had more than just compassion and running water; they had electricity and internet! “Internet, my old friend, you don’t know how much I’ve missed you.”

Watching the television for the first time was shocking. The true devastation of the city centre was heartbreaking. What was undoubtedly the finest city in New Zealand had become rubble and the landmarks which defined it and its heritage were devastated.

Simon and Amy left on a flight for London just 3 days ago and already I’m missing them. I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m going to stay, but I don’t know where. Life moves on and I’m lucky to be alive. God bless all those who are not as lucky as we are.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 at 6:56 pm and is filed under New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.