MONDAY 14 MARCH - Christchurch - A traumatised city

Throughout my time in Australia I have been seeking advice on the advisability of sticking to my original itinerary and heading from Sydney to Christchurch in the aftermath of the earthquake that hit the city on 22 February. QANTAS advised that, apart from the city centre, the remainder of the Canterbury region was open for business and wanted people to continue to come. As I was preparing to leave Australia news was coming through of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Everyone in the Pacific region is highly sensitised to the recent spate of natural disasters affecting this part of the world.

So with some concern about what I would find I continued with the plan and departed Sydney early on Monday. I was met at Christchurch airport by Simon O'Dowd, Managing Director of Alpine View Retirement Village and Chairman of the New Zealand Aged Care Association. Simon could only spend a short time with me as he needed to attend a memorial service for a colleague lost in the quake. I was anxious not to be in the way.

Simon briefed me on the situation in the city before dropping me off at my accommodation, the Tudor Court Motel on Bealey Avenue. This avenue forms the northern perimeter of the cordoned and closed area of the city centre. He explained how the earthquake had affected his family, his staff and the Alpine View village. There is hardly a family in this small city of 380,000 people that has not been affected. Everyone knows someone who has suffered loss, injury or damage. The buildings at Alpine View were undamaged miraculously despite being near the centre of the damaged area, but several residents fell and fractured hips and femurs in the earthquake which struck at 1.18pm just as many were making their way back to their rooms after lunch. The care home was then without power and water for three days and as roads were cut it was not possible to get the injured to hospital or to get them pain relief medication. 6 Care facilities in the city have been closed and buildings condemned. Some 500 residents have had to be relocated to other parts of the country, some as far as Auckland. The crisis has severely tested the ability of the community to respond and the sense one gets is, that despite tremendous difficulty and a death toll now in the hundreds, the people of the city have pulled together in a tremendous way to pick themselves up and get things moving again.

I had been told before I came that people were trying to maintain business as usual in the city but in reality it is anything but. The entire city centre remains closed and cordoned off with soldiers on the street corners. There are still search operations underway but, with no further hope of survivors, the emphasis is on recovering bodies and stabilising buildings, so that slowly the city centre can be made accessible to business owners.





It is an extraordinary sight in a city that looks and feels otherwise just like an English town. The military presence is reassuring but it reminds one of Belfast in the '70s. Imagine Taunton or Wells with gaping holes in the streets and virtually all masonry built buildings destroyed or condemned.


This is the ruined church immediately across the street from my motel.....


......and this is the scene just along the street. There are piles of rubble everywhere and great mounds of silt from the extraordinary liquefaction phenomena that accompanied the quake, forcing silt through the ground and raising manhole covers etc as much as a metre off the ground. The are huge cracks and holes in the roads and many remain closed.


Most modern frame construction buildings are intact. The atmosphere amongst the people is one of determination to clear up and rebuild the city as soon as they can but it will take years. The central business district is closed so the economic impact will be huge as is the trauma at the loss of life. Tourism has dried up so there is little money coming in to the city.


There is a big memorial event planned for later this week and several of the people I spoke with said how pleased they were at the news that Prince William is coming to be with them to show support for the people of the city. I hope this will help ease the pain in this once lovely city, but it will take years to heal.

Location:Christchurch