When my city fell

I’m looking forward to watching When A City Falls on television tonight.

I frequently ran into filmmaker, Gerard Smyth, on the damaged Christchurch streets in those hours and days after February 22.

He captured scenes that many of us never saw because we had no electricity. By the evening we had taken stock of family and friends and were huddling around candles and barbeques and listening to transistor radios.

It’s not often a city is blacked out. The silence was immense after a day of sirens and helicopters. The stars gleamed from a clear sky, the southern cross like a beacon. It was brief moment of solace between shakes, ahead of the exhausting work we knew lay ahead.

Although I was outside the CTV building within minutes of its collapse that day, I had no idea there were people trapped and dying there. I had followed a helicopter that was dropping water from a monsoon bucket on a building on fire.

Rescuers looked askance as I continued to take photographs and report to NBR's Auckland office on my cellphone.

My Auckland colleague Jock Anderson asked if I could see the Anglican cathedral in Cathedral Square. That was when I realised one of our major city landmarks was gone and this must be a really big one.

Rubble continued to shake loose from buildings and hit the footpath as I cycled and walked through the broken city centre to check my daughter’s flat. Her cell phone text finally arrived to say she was safe.

Even when I reached Latimer Square and saw the thousands of people gathered there comforting each other, I never knew until later that the tents on the grass were part of a triage system quickly set up to care for the dying and injured.

An hour earlier I was driving my car along Fitzgerald Ave when the quake hit, the road bucked and slumped about two metres. As I pulled to halt, huge cracks opened up. Then the water and liquefaction erupted in floods.

Everyone has their own stories. Wherever they were, strangers comforted each other.

It was amazing the way people began doing things they had never been trained to do. The way drivers immediately made way for the procession of cars coming the wrong way along one-way Oxford Tce carrying wounded people to the hospital. Passersby who began pulling debris off injured people.

Or the hospital worker who directed drivers for hours to deliver their injured people and move their vehicles out again so the next arrivals could come in.

Or the young orthopaedic doctor who was attending a conference when she called upon to amputate the leg of someone trapped in the PGG building.

Most of us were more removed from those dramas. We took care of those around us and in coming days we shared the clean up jobs with neighbours, learned their names and made new friends.

Many who will never be officially recognised carried out voluntary work or went well beyond their normal tasks. They and their family and friends know who they are, even if they are not among the deserving heroes being showered with civic accolades today. Nor should they begrudge those who were overwhelmed by their own losses and responsibilities and focused on them.

People mostly behaved magnificently in the aftermath of February 22.

The challenge for those involved in the rebuild is to continually remind themselves that “business as usual” in Christchurch is somewhere in a distant future we cannot see.