Witters from Down Under: Earthquake Update
Created | Updated Mar 9, 2014
Having moved from Scotland to Australia in 2005 to find out if she had fallen in love with the country as well as her husband a decade ago, she decided that the answer was ‘yes’ and intended to stay.
However life has always had a marvellous way of changing her best-laid plans. And it happened again. An unexpected work opportunity presented itself in mid-2008: one too good to miss.
As a result the Witter from Down Under is now coming from the land of the long white cloud - New Zealand.
Please join us and read Frenchbean’s update on what’s been happening.
14,000 earthquakes and still counting...
Hello Everybody 
It is three years since the earthquakes which the world now associates with Christchurch. 22nd February 2011 is the date remembered and rightly so, for it was the day on which 185 lives were lost.
My experience
For me it will always be 4th September 2010 which had the greater impact, when at 4.35am I woke up as a quartet of earthquakes ripped the world apart; 7.1, 5.8, 5.5 and 5.2 magnitude shakes in 50 seconds of terror.
Looking back at the records of the last 14,000 quakes I am amazed to see that in the 25 minutes from 4.35 to 5am on that particular morning we had 20 earthquakes of magnitude 4.7 or greater. No wonder I was terrified: it was quite the baptism of fire to seismic activity.
Back to 22nd February: Reading some of my writing in the immediate aftermath, I am fascinated to have forgotten some of the details. Selective memory for the sake of sanity perhaps?
For instance, this describes our flight from the city on the afternoon of the big shake, which had slipped my mind:
As we drove along Park Terrace in near-stationary traffic, with the River Avon and Hagley Park on our left and four- and five-storey apartments on our right, there was a zinger of an aftershock which ripped through beneath us.
As I hung onto the steering wheel I could feel the car tipping and twisting with the road, and then I watched as the tarmac immediately in front of us rose up a little, split and subsided into a long crack across the carriageway. Fortunately the traffic moved at that moment and it was with real relief that I drove across the crack before silt bubbled out of it.
And while I’d been mesmerised by the road surface for those couple of seconds, Sarah had been watching with horror as the riverside willow trees tipped backwards and forwards on their roots.
Conversely I have been hunting for a description of hiding beneath my desk, the interrupted phone conversation, the surprise when I heard that the floor-to-ceiling windows had shattered (I didn’t hear or see a thing despite being only five or so metres from them when they smashed) and the shaking of my body that wouldn’t stop for hours afterwards.
None of that appears in my records, but it all remains strongly vivid in my memory.
Thankfully we have moved on, although visitors fresh to Chchch might be surprised to know that.
The empty CBD is striking. The huge vacant lots are occupied by a smattering of cars. More fences go up, behind which demolition and / or reconstruction is taking place. People walk around either agog, or completely oblivious depending upon their sense of what is normal.
I am in the oblivious camp usually, but from time to time I consciously open my eyes anew to the strangeness around me.
In so doing this week, the two things that struck me were the continuing preponderance of huge cranes (now mostly rebuilding rather than destroying) and the dominance of grey.
Roadworks are endless, with some of the city streets being dug up for the fourth or fifth time, because the utility companies have differing priorities and simply can’t work in the same spot at the same time. On a weekly basis I find my latest route into work blocked off and am now a master of navigating the backstreets of the city.
There’s a board-game idea in there somewhere…
My experience put into perspective
Three years ago I wrote about “my deep and abiding gratitude for having been able to walk away unscathed from the devastation of the earthquakes on 22nd February.” There aren’t many days when that sentiment isn’t still with me.
I am also grateful for the fact that I didn’t have a house or land badly compromised by the earthquakes: there is a long-lasting and insidious legacy being experienced by thousands of people in Chchch and the immediate surroundings.
I will try to be objective, but to be honest there are injustices happening which make it pretty hard to keep my deep-rooted socialist tendencies at bay and to hold back a really good rant.
It is a salutary tale of people’s helplessness in the face of big-government and big-business which reminds me that there is always somebody a whole lot worse off than I have ever been.
I can’t begin to give you the full story: it is beyond my understanding – and that is despite having the advantage of living here. Incomprehensible takes on a new meaning. Here’s an attempt to explain:
In a nutshell, the root of the issue is that there are 11,000 fewer homes in the city than before the earthquakes and thousands more remain significantly damaged.
After three years I think everybody thought that people’s basic need for decent housing that provides shelter, security, privacy and warmth would have been grasped, faced up to and dealt with.
But no…
The difficulties still facing thousands of people revolve around house insurance companies, valuations, the relative costs of rebuild or repair, the availability of builders, the availability of homes and a rampant housing market (both to buy and rental).
Despite early flights from the city, the total population of Chchch City has only decreased by around 5,000, according to the 2013 Census.
And the total population in Greater Chchch has actually increased by 12,000 since 20061. This area includes the surrounding areas of Waimakariri District – a 17% population increase - and Selwyn District – up 33%.
The explanation is clear: people are moving out of the city to the suburban satellite towns and everywhere housing is at a premium.
I digress slightly…
Of 7,848 insurer-led earthquake-related housing repairs (those costing more than $100,000 – if lower than that figure it resulted in EQC-led repairs) only 769 homes have been completed.
Where people are facing full rebuilds, there were 4,731 households who ended up dealing with insurance companies and as of last week only 725 rebuilds had been completed.
This means that after three years there are still more than 11,000 households (30,000-odd people) struggling through engineers’ reports (sometimes multiple), insurance claims, requirements for temporary accommodation and a bewildering number of other issues to face before any kind of normal life can be resumed.
These are people who are stuck without a pay-out and / or without agreement from insurers or the Government about the value of their erstwhile homes. Or they are folk who have such a paltry sum ‘agreed’ that they are unable to buy or rent anywhere new.
As a result there are still people living in technically ‘unliveable’ houses, in garages, in tents, in garden sheds and on friends’ sofas.
Three years on…
Insurers are getting a lot of bad press but I do wonder about the added culpability of the Government in all of this. After all, it is the Government. It is elected to govern, which my lovely dictionary defines as:
“to direct and control the actions and affairs of a people, a state or its members”
I snorted with derision at the definition. From what I have seen there’s precious little direction or control going on here. Maybe the dictionary definition of government doesn’t reflect the ‘realities’ of 21st Century global politics.
But try telling that to a family still sleeping in a garage three years after their house became uninhabitable.
There’s plenty of commentary from Ministers about allowing the market economy to sort everything out, but the latest stats show that the gap between those in Chchch who are okay and those who are not is widening.
The Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) issued a press release this week, warning us of what we surely already know: that Christchurch is following the patterns following other international disasters. Antisocial behaviour, suicide attempts and mental health referrals are at an all-time high three years on.
Psychiatric presentations to the CDHB have seen a 35% increase in new emergency patients in the last two years. This means that each month, more than 400 people access the psychiatric emergency service, mostly suffering from acute mental distress, delusions, hallucinations or self-harm.
Probably the only ray of hope is that it’s an election year and there are signs that our National Government is bending a few of its own previously strongly-held beliefs in the face of possible widespread vilification.
Accordingly, it’s just been announced that the Government is joining Christchurch City Council in a multi-million dollar “Housing Accord” to tackle the lack of affordable rental housing. The cynic in me wonders how long that will last after the election if the current Government is returned.
Rant largely averted…Thank you for your patience…
Stay safe...
Witters from Down Under Archive
