It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.
~ Mark Twain
As soon as we landed in Christchurch, New Zealand our group of 44 piled into a luxury bus equipped with soft seats in a flashy fabric and a bathroom. We met our driver Malcolm, a strapping blonde gent who over the next week was to narrate our way across his country. You could quickly see that Malcolm was not a chatterbox, but one of those folks who was worth listening to when he spoke.
It was January 22, 2011. He loaded our bags and we headed out of the airport on the exit lane. As he approached the traffic circle that would lead us to town, there was a loud clunk and we stopped dead. He shifted, and tried and this and that, but there we sat. His jaw twitched, he traded a couple of quiet comments with Mark, our cheerful guide, and got on the phone.
In ten minutes, a new bus pulled up and all able-bodied passengers were recruited to shift the bags into our new bus. It was a lovely example of patience by all concerned. We were on our way in about 20 minutes, start to finish. We didn’t think of our breakdown as an omen.
He drove us through the outskirts, neighborhoods of tidy small stone and frame houses divided by brick fences, each shielding a garden bursting with veggies and blooms. It was summer there so we saw the best of the vegetation, we were told. It felt very English.
When we reached the downtown, he pointed out the contrast between old buildings – old to them is the late 1800s – and stark modern structures that look like they snuck into all the spaces between the old ones. Some buildings had tarps over their top floors and were currently not occupied. One lot had a considerable pile of concrete blocks and slabs. We were told that a building had recently been removed from the site. The streets were busy with traffic and pedestrians. This was the central business district, Malcolm he said, in the middle of a workday.
He explained the damaged buildings and the rubble. On September 4, 2010 a 7.1 earthquake had hit Christchurch. While there had been extensive damage, most buildings were still in place. It had struck on a Sunday morning when the area was not crowded, and there was no loss of life. A 7.1 earthquake and no one was killed? Amazing. They had dodged a bullet there.
You can’t be in New Zealand for long before you hear about two things – volcanoes and earthquakes. The country sits on top of plates and faults and amid volcanoes, defunct and active. It is why their country is so mountainous and therefore so gorgeous, and why their lakes are the brilliant aqua color that makes the photographs look as if they’ve been doctored, from the volcanic minerals washed down from the mountains with their rains.
That very morning, Malcolm told us, there had been a 4.1 aftershock from that September earthquake, that shook things up for a few moments. If you live here, he said, you have to get used to the frequent aftershocks. With a tourist’s detachment, I thought, “Darn. I would have liked to see what that was like.” We wondered at the seemingly intact city – how could it survive such a strong quake and look this good?
We passed by a cathedral and were told that visitors could climb all the way to the top of the tower for a birdseye view of the city. We stopped for a traffic light nearby, in front of a seven-story building with a giant sign that said CTV, the Canterbury TV network. I peered into the windows at people at work inside. We’d barely looked at TV on the trip and it reminded me to tune in to see what it was like.
On another block, a striking modern house made up of poured concrete and windows was sandwiched in between a gray office building and a church. A dog looked out the window at us. None of the buildings were very tall it seemed. I’d have to ask if that was due to zoning, or earthquake threat, or both.
As we took the turn toward our hotel, we circled a giant stretch of parkland that included a golf course and multiple athletic fields. Banners announced a regional meet for disabled athletes. The signup table was a mob scene.
We passed by the hospital. A series of mismatched additions ringed the original old buildings. Even without the signs, it would be easily recognizable as a hospital. It was late afternoon, and nurses in scrubs hurried by on their way home, outpatients waited for the bus, an ambulance pulled in. This was nothing like the quiet orderliness of the suburbs.
At the hotel we checked in at the same time as a group of disabled athletes and watched as they sorted out their various types of wheelchairs, recumbent bikes and other equipment. We stepped back to get our wheeled suitcases out of their way.
Later that night, I read in the local paper about tussles between local officials and others who felt that bureaucratic delays had stood in the way of the repair of damaged buildings. Local politics, I thought, were the same everywhere, citizens always fighting about something. Tradesmen who had traveled to Christchurch hoping to help with the rebuilding were quoted in the article as being ready to leave in frustration because of the delays. I put away the paper and thought nothing more of it, until I went through a museum exhibit a few days later that included a simulation of an earthquake. Twelve of us entered a replica of a small house and the attendant closed the door behind us. It was set up with all kinds of familiar items, couches, tables, vases, picture frames, a TV set, all anchored down. The floor started to shake, the walls shifted, the floor tipped, and I lost my desire to experience an aftershock.
With 14,000 earthquakes a year, New Zealand has to be equipped for the 10% or so that may result in damage and possibly compromised buildings. After a quake, local engineers peruse each affected building and tag it green (okay), yellow (needs some reinforcement), or red (cannot be used without major structural work). This applied to Christchurch too.
During the whole trip, there was a hint of danger in the air. In the Australian outback we were regaled with stories of how well the Aboriginal people had learned over the centuries to withstand the harsh conditions, while newcomers, from the early Europeans to current travelers, repeatedly underestimated the heat, the dryness, the distances and ended up sprinkling their bones across the land.
And during our visit to the Great Barrier Reef, snorkelers had to wear special suits to fend off painful jellyfish contact. We learned too that Australia has the greatest number of lethal creatures on earth. And since the Aussies drive on the left, every time you stepped off a curb you had to calculate which direction the speeding cars you might walk out in front of were coming from.
Before we arrived, the Queensland region of Australia had been hit by massive flooding. While we were still on the trip, but had moved on to New Zealand, Yasi, a Katrina-sized cyclone, hit the same area. Towns were severely damaged and the flooding resumed.
For the rest of the trip, we watched TV in earnest, the news reports bouncing between protests in Egypt and weather in Queensland. Maybe the workers in the Christchurch TV office building were working on those stories. We didn’t think of ourselves, or them, being at risk. The town survived the big one, so what could an aftershock do?
We returned home with pictures to download and stories to tell and jet lag to overcome. Two weeks later, on February 22, 2011, Christchurch was hit with a 6.3 earthquake, midday on a work day. I found out about it on Facebook, from a relative’s post that his son, who was also traveling in New Zealand, was safe. I rushed to CNN and saw that many of the buildings we had seen were in ruins. The cathedral was the backdrop for every news report. Its steeple was down, the roof caved in. Only rescue workers were allowed inside, to see if any worshippers or tourists were trapped.
The priest, the mayor, terrified mothers searching for their children were interviewed. On the next report, the death toll was mounting from the initial 20. Two hundred were missing, then 300. It brought back the memory of September 11 in New York, with hope in the beginning that people would be rescued, saved by a desk, or a doorway. It soon became clear that only a few people would emerge from those ruins alive.
The third report showed a pancaked office building where the bulk of the missing were thought to be. It was the CTV building, that housed not only the network, but a foreign language school and other offices.
Those workers I spied on through my bus window, had they been out for lunch or in there with the flattened building coming down on them? The mother of one of them told a reporter that she kept calling her daughter’s cell phone, hoping that even if she could not answer it, a rescuer might hear it and know where to look for her.
After official analysis, it turned out that the February earthquake was really an aftershock from the September quake – unfinished business from the initial event that hadn’t seemed so bad. And that the buildings that came down this time had stood there damaged and waiting for disaster for months. It could have happened while I was riding by on the bus, while the nurses were walking home, or during a visitor tour of the cathedral. But it waited for lunchtime on a busy work day on what everyone assumed was just another normal day.
Those fights over buildings and repairs and delays weren’t just about politics or bureaucracy. They were about life and death. And unfinished business that was worth fighting about.
I’m haunted by the mother, calling her daughter again and again, not giving up hope until she had to. I wish she knew that another mother halfway across the world remembers her, and her daughter.
CBH - 02/11
CBH - 02/11
