24 hours and 17 seconds

Plane window photos...can never get enough  of  Mother Nature....

Last Wednesday I went overseas for 24 hours and I have to tell you that I  thought I was pretty clever trying to fit everything into 86,400 seconds.

Well, that was my thinking until I landed anyway. 

And then the smugness was pretty much wiped off my face when I saw first hand how much Mother Nature can pack into 17 seconds.

As I left the Airport Arrivals Hall I was relieved to find there was one last cab on the rank.  The driver opened the door and in that unmistakable Kiwi accent, said, “Welcome to Christchurch love, where are you off to then?”

“Bealey Avenue", I said as I fastened my seat belt.

As we manoeuvred through the congested airport traffic, I looked for his ID on the dashboard. It's a habit I've gotten into since getting into an unauthorised cab in NYC once but that's a story for another time.

This cab driver's name was Hohepa. "It's a Maori version for the name Joseph" he later told me.  

He asked me what had bought me to Christchurch.  “Work, just work.” I said.

Of course what I didn't tell him was that I was also very curious about how the City was recovering from the big Earthquakes, the last one back in 2011.

As I looked out the window at the passing urban landscape it was not hard to see the impact that a 6.3 magnitude earthquake can have. The scars were still fresh. There were empty blocks of land where houses once proudly stood, intricate scaffolding holding up homes and kilometers of high wire fences displaying danger signs to keep nosey visitors out.

As we passed the shell of this Church, I asked Hohepa how everyone was doing two years on.

 

“We’re getting there”, he said, “but it's so ridiculously slow and frustrating. The CBD is like a ghost town. It is eerie. We have lost our heart and soul."

Hohepa told me that the CBD is fenced off and all the remaining buildings are  being slowly demolished. He said that this damage was nothing compared to the hundreds of uninhabitable homes to the east of the City which are on land which can never be built on again.

He looked at me in his rear vision mirror and said, “You know it only lasted 17 seconds don’t you? 17 horrific seconds.”

I asked him what he was doing when the quake hit and he told me that he was driving a passenger from the Airport and the car started rocking violently from side to side. 

"In seconds, the roads were ripped open with all this thick silty sludge seeping through", he said, shaking his head from side to side.  "Buildings had fallen on buses and cars and you could see bodies under the rubble. It was a war zone and the noise was unbelievable."

We travelled in silence for a couple of minutes and, not wanting to cause any distress, I changed the subject and asked about the unusually warm, balmy weather.

However, it seemed Hohepa was having none of that. He wanted to stay on topic and tell me about the darkest day of his life.

He told me that he waited in his car for what seemed like hours and eventually made it home. The house was so badly damaged he sat outside on the footpath waiting for his wife to come home.  She had texted him earlier in the day to say that she would be home around 6pm.

Six o’clock came, nothing. Seven o’clock came, nothing.

I started to move uncomfortably in my seat hoping like hell that he was going to say she made it home at 8 o’clock.

He didn’t, because she didn't.

She died in the CCTV building in the CBD along with over 100 other people.

As we circled the city centre, he pointed out the empty block of land where her office building once stood. And where she lost her life.

All gone, no sign of life or a building that once was

 

 “I am so sorry, I really am.” I said. Somehow, there were no right words. 

I wondered, perhaps out loud, how he managed to drive visitors around every day when questions about the earthquakes were never far from anyone's lips.  

He said he was used to it as his passengers talk about 'it'.  Even the locals. He told me about a conversation he had had with a passenger two weeks earlier. He picked up a guy from the Airport and, as expected, the conversation quickly turned to the earthquake and its aftermath. The passenger asked him if he knew anyone who died in the city building collapses. He said, yes he did and the passenger asked him their name. He gave him the name without revealing it was his wife. The passenger said, “Oh yes, she was the sixth last body I identified in that building”.

Confronting stuff.

Hohepa dropped me off at my Hotel and I wished him well. I really hoped our conversation had not caused him yet another restless night. 

Later that night, as I sat relaxing on a couch watching the news, I felt a slight rumble and the building move. I held my breath. I read that Christchurch has had more than 11,200 aftershocks since the earthquake 2 years ago. I am guessing that figure is now 11,201. 

The next day I got the chance to walk around the high wire fences surrounding the CBD. It is a shock. I tried to imagine what the city centre looked like when I visited 12 years ago - something like this picture below. I remember the iconic Cathedral in the heart of the city very well.

 

Now the CBD looks like one large demolition site. It is deserted apart from unstable buildings, rubble, large pieces of machinery and a myriad of workers in orange jackets and hard hats. 

And that iconic Cathedral? It's not so grand anymore without its steeple. 

Click on the image to make it larger

When disasters hit, we see the live images on TV, we feel for the people involved, we donate money to appeals and then we somehow... forget. One disaster is replaced by another. And Life goes on.

Except, of course, for those who still live with the destruction day in day out.

BUT, and its a BIG BEAUTIFUL BUT, against that grey dusty rubble stained backdrop the signposts of renewal are emerging too. 

There are brightly coloured pots with blooming flowers strategically placed along the edge of the wire framed CBD. They make you smile. And more incredibly, there is a temporary mall called RE:START at the edge of the city centre with 40 stores housed in old shipping containers (there is a picture of these containers in the previous mosaic photo stacked up outside a building). The containers have been painted bright colours and configured in architecturally interesting ways. So very, very clever.

It's hard to imagine these temporary buildings are made out of old shipping containers...clever!

And while it must be hard for locals to look for, let alone see any silver lining quite yet, I am sure that every visitor to the City clearly sees the sprouting seeds of hope. 

I am also sure that on those return taxi rides to the Airport the conversation is all about the fantastic progress being made. I certainly know that was the conversation I had with my taxi driver.

I just really, really hoped that the taxi driver I was having the conversation with had been Hohepa.

I salute you Christchurch and all that call you home. You are incredibly brave and resilient. Better days will return.

And next time, I will stay longer than one day. Time has no meaning after all unless we choose to give it significance.