Brett's Southern Crossing

After visiting Arthur’s Pass I came back to Christchurch to meet up with a few more people coming off the ice.  We were planning to do a little road trip, but those plans went out the window once the earthquake hit.

Dust rising above the CBD moments after the quake

A group of us were planning to meet in Cathedral Square around noon to go find some Thai food, and I spent the late morning in a nice café called Java Coffee House.  I’d been taking advantage of the wifi there to make some reservations, and was packing up my things when the shaking began.  At first I assumed it was just an aftershock – which were still common after the September 2010 earthquake and in fact scientists consider this to officially be “just” an aftershock.  It was a strange feeling, I didn’t notice any up and down movement.  It was all lateral movement underneath me and my table seemed to be zooming all over the room with me in my chair riding right along with it.  I gripped the sides of the table and hung on to try to keep from falling.  Some glass began to break as bottles fell off the shelves.

The building across the street from me, before the quake

This café is located at the intersections of Manchester, Lichfield and High streets.  High Street cuts diagonally through the block, so I was on the ground floor of one of those wedge shaped buildings, and was in the pointy end of the triangle where all the streets come together.  I had picked a table near the window facing (I think) High Street.  Anyway, after the quake had been going for a few seconds, suddenly a huge amount of concrete and stone crashed onto the sidewalk just outside the window I was sitting at.  At that point I realized this was definitely not a little aftershock and I ran (more quickly than I knew I could move) out of the opposite side of the building and into the center of the street.  It wasn’t very far, since I was in the pointy end of the building the doors on either side were only about 15 or 20 feet from each other.

It was hard to see because the whole area was filled with white dust.  There were a lot of people milling around, a few of them screaming or crying.  The shops on the opposite side of the street were severely damaged, and a road construction crew that had been just up the block ran up to start digging in the rubble.  A few of them found a clear path to a side door, which they kicked in but found no one inside.  I was a bit stunned and couldn’t think of anything in particular that made sense to do, so after a moment I climbed up on the pile of debris and helped them move wood and concrete for a few minutes.  A plume of dust was blowing out of the debris about 10 feet into the air from what I suspected was a gas leak (although I couldn’t smell anything, so maybe not…but I’m not sure what else would cause that). I could see down in the pile a black car, crushed down to roughly knee height.  I thought these were parked cars at the time, though I later learned that the debris had fallen pretty far into the street and at least two occupied cars were crushed in this spot.

After the quake. This photo was taken from about 90 degrees to the left of the before shot. You can see the building I was in to the right in the background...if you look near the top, you can see the exposed area where part of the two upper stories collapsed onto the sidewalk near my table

Cantabrians have been through earthquakes before, most recently the 7.1 magnitude quake last September, so the response from the government was immediate and orderly.  Just a few minutes after the shaking stopped a police officer arrived at our intersection, and asked us to move several blocks down Colombo Street to a park where there would be no risk from further debris during an aftershock.  It sounded like a good idea to me, so I left the debris pile and ran back into the café to get my things.  This was pretty stupid, but I really wanted my phone so I could send some texts.  The road crew now had a few digging machines they were using helping to lift larger beams and blocks of stone off the pile.

After reaching the park I began to watch the crowd streaming down the road from the CBD.  I hoped I would see a familiar face, since I knew dozens of people in Christchurch.  A number of people were caked in dust, and these people generally seemed to have minor cuts and head injuries.  They were completely stoic, shell-shocked, and it reminded me a bit of the ghostly white people in the streets after the World Trade Center collapsed.  The worst actual injury I saw was a girl who seemed like she probably had a broken ankle.  Her friends were helping her, one under each arm.  Lots of cars were also leaving town, often stopping to pick up anyone who needed to get to a hospital.

At this point I was realizing how likely it was that someone I knew from the ice could have been injured or killed, and I was very worried.  I didn’t know exactly what to do or where to go.  My hostel I was going to check into that night was on Cathedral Square so that was out, and it seemed like going in a building again anytime soon would be a terrible idea anyway.  After a while I thought the best thing would be to try to find some friends, and the most likely spot for that would be Hagley Park.  Hagley Park is a huge park area on the west side of the city.  It’s only a few minutes walk from the Cathedral, and many hostels and hotels are nearby.  So it made a lot of sense that the people I knew would have gone there.  First I had to walk down Colombo street south to get far from the downtown area.  The police, fire, and Civil Defense workers had already taped and cordoned off a lot of streets.  They were also taping off areas of the sidewalk close to damaged buildings.

South down Colombo street the damage was a lot less severe.  The facades of a few buildings had collapsed, but many buildings looked undamaged (I could hear a cacophony of burglar alarms ringing though).  Several buildings that were entirely made of glass didn’t have so much as a pane broken.  The CBD is mostly historic buildings, whereas elsewhere in the city the buildings are modern and built to stringent standards.  The streets themselves were cracked and grey mud from liquefaction was rising into the road.  Shopping malls were intact but some of the parking structures weren’t so lucky.  Construction workers with scissor lifts were peering into the gaps between levels of pancaked parking structures and yelling to see if anyone was trapped.

A pancaked parking structure south of the CBD

I worked my way around the outskirts of downtown, passing the Christchurch hospital which had been temporarily evacuated.  A helicopter landed in an amazingly tight area between streetlights in an intersection to pick up a patient.  I finally came to the Windsor Bed and Breakfast, and was very relieved to find my friends Ed, Celeen, and Kira standing outside.  We headed up to the park to search for others, and found a number of other ice people plus plenty of reports of friends who had been seen since the earthquake.  By now I was feeling much better, with only a few people unaccounted for.

We came to a fenced in area of the park and set up a tent, assuming that we would need to spend the night in the park.  The staff of the Crowne Plaza (severely damaged, probably a total loss) soon arrived with water and heavy duty trash bags to be used as makeshift ponchos since it was threatening to rain.  The area was fenced off to prepare for a festival and there were palettes of thick plywood, which were passed out to insulate people from the cool ground.  Another person from the ice borrowed my phone to call the US Antarctic Program office to check in, and we learned that they were offering free shuttle service to the offices at the airport and a place to sleep.  The airport still had power and internet, so it was a tempting offer.

We left for the edge of the park to see who was near the YMCA (where my luggage was being stored; the building was undamaged but without power).  The YMCA set up an outdoor kitchen and made a huge dinner for all the displaced people hanging around.  Eventually I decided to head the Antarctic Center for the night along with several others, and we walked through the park to the western part of the city were roads were moving normally and shuttles could pick us up.  As we waited at a bus stop, a local stopped and crammed 7 of us with our packs into their SUV and gave us a ride.

To my surprise, the Antarctic Center was packed with people!  Probably 50+ people were there, swapping stories and waiting in line to use the computer training room to post updates on facebook or send emails.  The rest of the people I hadn’t heard from were there, and I finally felt confident that everyone I knew was safe.  There were a lot of different experiences, from those that were at the airport and thought it was just a little shake to people in Cathedral square that watched the steeple collapse while running to dodge falling bricks.

The USAP staff were checking names off a list of recently redeployed people and collecting information on others who had been seen since the earthquake or were known to be elsewhere in the country.  Soon, someone showed up with tons of food…snacks, fruit, soda, water, beer, and hot dogs which were grilled on the sidewalk outside.  Going from the initial destruction of the day to a cookout and reunion with so many friends was totally surreal.  The USAP staff also got lots of sleeping bags and offered to let us spend the night in the Antarctic passenger terminal.

But things were going to even a little bit weirder for me.  On this day there happened to be a meeting of the US/New Zealand Development Council in Christchurch, which on the US side consisted of a lot of State Department diplomats, plus various high level members of the business community (for example, a board member from Boeing).  They were at the Antarctic center as well, wearing very nice suits, munching hot dogs next to us.  The New Zealand government arranged for their air force to fly them back to Auckland that evening, and a number of people from the USAP were interesting in going as well.  It seemed that we were being discouraged from going, since so soon after the disaster the program wasn’t sure how they would be able to support us in Auckland.  However myself and two marine techs from the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer had all of our luggage and our passports and were planning to go to Auckland anyway.  We asked the Air Force if we could get on the flight and it was no problem.

Three grubby backpackers flew out around 11pm in the company of about 60 diplomats, and we ended up at an Air Force base near Auckland.  We were met by an official from the US Embassy who offered to help us replace passports or provide emergency funds if we didn’t have anything available.  We were all actually fine and didn’t need assistance, but we did get a ride in a shuttle they had arranged for some of the State Department staff to a motel for the night.  By then it was around 2am, and with all the adrenaline and stress and walking throughout the day I immediately fell asleep.

Despite the tragic events of that day it was great to see how the people in New Zealand reacted to it.  The government responded immediately to secure the area, move people to safety, and search for survivors.  Ordinary citizens pitched in to help transport people home or to get medical treatment.  Hotels, shopkeepers, and civil defense quickly provided food, water, and shelter to anyone displaced.  And close to home, the USAP cared for us very well in the hours after the earthquake.  In the following days they tracked down every person that had left the ice recently, arranged a couple of special air force flights to move people to Auckland, and offered to try to retrieve and mail back all the luggage and personal belongings abandoned in the cordoned off area of the city later this year.  Air New Zealand offered very cheap standby fares to fly back to Christchurch, which I needed to do to continue on to Australia.  I feel fortunate to have been surrounded by so many great people and organizations.