Report from Christchurch [1 ed.] 9781927131862

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Report from Christchurch Rebecca Macfie Foreword by Pamela Stirling

A BWB Text from Bridget Williams Books in association with the New Zealand Listener

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Table of Contents Introducing BWB Texts Foreword Author Note Hope and despair We are just shattered Blast those barriers Read all about it Enter the red zone Christchurch is struck again Hard yards: The plight of Canterbury landowners Christchurch 12 months on Seeing the red zone Rush to ruin: Christchurch's heritage buildings are a must keep Postcards from Christchurch one year on How the Christchurch Pops Choir lit up our neighbourhood Outside the square: Can Christchurch be revitalised?

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Frustration and rage: Christchurch homeowners face long wait for rebuild Cranmer Courts: Christchurch heritage reduced to mulch About the Author Acknowledgements Copyright and Publisher Information

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Introducing BWB Texts BWB TEXTS offer a new form of reading for New Zealanders. Commissioned as short digital-only works, BWB TEXTS unlock diverse stories, insights and analysis from the best of our past, present and future New Zealand writing. The team behind BWB TEXTS: at BWB, Tom Rennie and Bridget Williams; commissioning editors: Geoff Walker and Max Rashbrooke. Visit www.bwb.co.nz for more information on BWB TEXTS including TEXTS by Sir Paul Callaghan, Maurice Gee, Kathleen Jones, Hamish Campbell and Sir Tipene O'Regan. BWB TEXTS is made possible by funding support from the BWB Publishing Trust.

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Foreword Be prepared. That has long been the best advice in dealing with earthquakes and yet we at the Listener, New Zealand’s leading current affairs magazine, could not have anticipated just how well prepared we were for the devastating series of earthquakes that suddenly hit our second biggest city of Christchurch from late 2010. It was not just that we had as our Christchurch-based writer Rebecca Macfie, one of New Zealand’s most respected senior journalists and the winner of more than a dozen prestigious awards. And it was not just that, as it transpired, Rebecca was right at the heart of events – when the second big quake hit Christchurch at 12.51pm on 22 February 2011, killing 185 people and damaging 100,000 homes, she was in her home office in the Port Hills, close to the epicentre. The distinguishing factor that was to make such a difference to this magazine and its readers was that Rebecca proved herself to be the kind of courageous individual who, although lucky to escape without serious injury from her badly damaged house, almost immediately and against all advice got on her bike – the only way to traverse otherwise impassable roads – and began observing, recording and interpreting the traumatic and chaotic scenes of the biggest natural disaster in this nation’s history.

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In the long months to come, when Christchurch experienced over 10,000 aftershocks, including some producing ground acceleration at world-record levels, she remained intrepidly at her post as our sole Christchurch reporter, interviewing over 100 people and venturing into the cordoned-off red zone half a dozen times. We agree wholeheartedly with Bridget Williams Books that the enduring insights of Rebecca’s reports deserve to be shared. Here are lessons from local communities on how best to nourish and support one another in a disaster. Here is advice for emergency services on how to become more efficient in helping shattered communities. Here, too, are helpful observations from those dealing with the tortuously slow processes of insurance claims, geotechnical reports and building assessments. And though Rebecca wrote that at times she felt like 'an observer in someone else’s disaster movie', she was so directly engaged that she has captured moments not only of struggle and survival but also of optimism and energy. One freezing May night, for example, she joined the efforts to rejuvenate the flattened inner city by learning ceroc, salsa and swing moves among dozens of strangers under the stars. Of all the things she wrote about in her unstable new world, it was the creativity that so surprised us. But then, given that it arises directly from Cantabrians’ compassion for each other, it’s the thing for which we should most have been prepared. PAMELA STIRLING EDITOR NEW ZEALAND LISTENER

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Author Note Whether by coincidence or design, Bridget Williams Books emailed their proposed selection of my articles about the Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2013. It had been a long time since I’d read most of them; it felt more like five years than two since I wrote my first account of post-disaster Christchurch, which the Listener sub-editors headlined 'Hope and despair'. I hadn’t noticed how much my memory had blunted until, as I re-read that piece and others from those first few weeks after 22.2.11, I felt a hard jab of anxiety as the sense of extremis came back to me. It was the shock of learning that people we knew had died and been terribly injured; the glazed fury of activity as we rescued stuff from our badly damaged home while neighbours all around us were doing the same; the earnest satisfaction that came from making do without functioning sewerage and endless running water; the adrenalin that pulsed through the torso and limbs with every decent aftershock. In post-earthquake Christchurch, I was one of the very lucky ones. Not just because none of my family were killed or injured; not just because, after nine months of displacement and frustration, we managed to do patch-up repairs on our house and go back home; not just because my husband and I had jobs and savings that made the post-disaster uncertainty seem less frightening.

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I was one of the lucky ones because I got to tell stories. Sometimes people I met would tell me that they appreciated what I was writing in the Listener, and that it helped them make sense of what had happened to us all. It was always humbling to receive such supportive comments, but I always knew that, in telling stories, I was also helping myself to find order and perspective amid calamity. Journalism was the searchlight I used to find my way through crisis. And, 23 years after I started out as a reporter, the earthquake and its aftermath reminded me that no matter how the present crisis facing the news industry ends up, communities need news. In post-quake Christchurch, people were hungry for it – news that helped them find their way through the tangle of insurance-related bureaucracy, that made sense of the topsy-turvy political effects of disaster, that gave them cause for hope and reason for rage, that helped them comprehend the magnitude of physical destruction and social upheaval. I am still trying to comprehend it. Even now, I cycle through the apocalyptic environment of the central city and feel winded by what I see. Even now, I wonder how the dismantling of entire suburbs and the forced buy-out of commercial property owners can occur without leaving a trail of grievances and hurt. But one thing I have come to comprehend a little better is the scale of the story: it has years – probably decades – to run. I would like to thank my wonderful colleagues at the Listener for giving me the space to tell what I can of Christchurch’s story. And thanks to Geoff Walker and Bridget Williams Books for the care that has been taken in putting this selection together.

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REBECCA MACFIE MARCH 2013

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Hope and despair 12 March 2011 The grief sits like hot magma, held down by a crust of action. There has been so much to do, at our house and in our street. We have boarded up the big front windows that were shunted out and smashed to the ground. We have shovelled up the sticky, smelly, shattered mess of our kitchen and dumped it in the wheelie bin, rescued books from under the rubble of bricks, retrieved documents and photos, and gathered up enough clothes and other bits and pieces to allow us to function comfortably in the meantime at my sister’s house. Often unexpectedly, the magma forces its way through, as when two of the carpenters from the construction company my husband works for came to help us on the first Friday. They had been working in the red-brick Poplar Lane in the CBD when they heard a bang and knew immediately to run for their lives out to Lichfield St, where they saw buildings crash down and a great cloud of dust go up. As he boarded up my downstairs office window, one told me of a man and woman who had been forced through the plate-glass frontage of a hair salon and were pinned by the legs and feet under a fallen verandah. The men had used their equipment to free the couple, enabling them to be taken away for treatment; they wondered if the man’s lower legs would have survived. Among it all they looked up and saw the Hotel Grand Chancellor, a block away, sway five to 10 metres from 11

side to side. The next day they were at work, and now here they were at our house, helping us cut a path through our chaos. Feelings burst through when anxiety for my neighbourhood shifts from a background ache to a sharp fear. For 17-and-a-half years our street, snuggled into the lower slopes of the Port Hills, has been my safe haven. We moved to our boxy brick house, with its terrible access and 1950s foibles, when our son was nearly two and I was 41 weeks pregnant with our daughter. We carted all our stuff up the zigzag path on the same day that New Zealand voted for MMP. Our kids would wander off to school in the valley along with most of the other kids in the street. We visit neighbours through gaps in hedges and over fences. It is my village. Now it is mostly deserted. Some houses lie in ruins, their owners lucky to be alive. Many other houses, although still standing, are severely damaged. One morning at 4.30 when I couldn’t sleep, I started the first of a new thread on the neighbourhood online group that a few of us got going last year. I shared our news and that of any others I knew about, and pleaded with everyone to keep the links alive while so many of us are displaced. Soon more than a dozen households had joined the conversation, exchanging their stories and sadness, spreading useful information about power and water, and other news of relevance in the area. Kia kaha, said many; our street would be strong again. On the first Wednesday evening, under a bleak damp sky, I flashed my media credentials and went through the central city cordon. Grand old buildings that had come stoically through the 4 September quake – among them the Canterbury

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Provincial Council Buildings and the old Christchurch Girls’ High School – were utterly savaged. The Arts Centre was much worse than before, although in better shape than I had feared. The glorious Cranmer Square corner of the old Christchurch Normal School was smashed. From behind the tight inner cordon I could see up Worcester St to the sorrow of the cathedral, and smell the acrid smoke from the CTV building. Through the wide empty streets there was a silence that was alien and wrong. On the few occasions when we have had time to watch the TV coverage of recovery efforts in the CBD, it has been with a strange emotional distance, as when one observes televised devastation in a foreign country. Yet we are all brutally bound to it. The husband of my daughter’s school principal is missing in the CTV building, as is the father of one of her good friends. One of our dearest friends was freed, injured and traumatised, after being trapped by a concrete beam in the Press building for two hours. In Aranui, Bexley, New Brighton, Avonside, St Albans, Shirley and beyond, the devastation is vast, but of a different variety to our neighbourhood. Houses are not flattened; instead, they squat bleak and impossibly burdened amid foul lakes of water and stinking silt. Streets have been ripped and buckled by the erupting ground, and chasms have opened up where the earth has spread towards the river. Areas that were hit hard by liquefaction last time have been hit seven, eight times harder, and areas that got away lightly last time have been hammered. As the diggers, trucks, householders and thousands of helpers work furiously to clear it away, the piled-up muck and the thin layer of silt left on the roads dries off and is kicked up by

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wind and traffic. It lodges in the back of the throat and in the nostrils, gets in the eyes and settles across every surface. The place has the smell and feel of the backstreets of Chennai or Denpasar, not Christchurch. For mile after mile I have cycled through broken streets like this; if there is a solution to it all, I do not yet see it. But so many good things are happening, too. People are (mostly) softer and gentler with one another. Strangers smile. We have reached out to friends who we don’t see enough of in normal times to give and receive support. Skills and labour are shared. People think of little things that can make such a big difference – for instance, someone at my husband’s work, on the largely undamaged western side of town, thought of installing a washing machine for staff who are without water. Others go literally miles out of their way to help – one friend travelled back and forth to North Canterbury with a water tank, adding to the supplies made available by the authorities. And the Student Army – now said to number 15,000 – is an incredible feat of intelligence, vision and organisation: every day, they fan out across the devastation equipped with spades, wheelbarrows, food and dust-masks, clearing the mess and helping to seize order from calamity. Amid the thick sense of loss and tragedy is an immense energy, the kind that comes from giving and doing. It’s as if we are all like those old-fashioned dynamo bicycle lights, generating energy by expending it; keeping going by keeping going. And there is something primal and affirming about simply making do amid greater need. For 25 years I have held onto the memory of watching a woman on a Tanzanian train scrub her face and her baby’s with one small palmful of

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water. I thought of her again one night, before we had water back on, when I managed a perfectly adequate camp shower with a couple of cups of water. We’ve had a few good laughs. A friend suggested the best way to deploy Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee, who apparently thinks liquefaction is not so bad, is to stick an axle through him and use him as a compactor. On day five I finally found the information I’d earlier spent a frustrating hour or so searching for on the Earthquake Commission (EQC) website, something about 180,000 people with claims from 4 September need to know: do we file a new claim, or will it be a reassessment of the old one? The answer was buried in verbiage nine paragraphs deep in a press release titled 'EQC focus on emergency repairs'. We all roared at the ineptitude of it. Bill, one of our neighbours whose house is rubble, rang Genesis to cancel the power; the call centre woman said they’d need to come and do a final meter reading. 'Very well,' said Bill, in his lovely lilting Scots accent, 'if you can find it.' Friends from both ends of the political spectrum are unanimous that the only fit punishment for the low-lifes who stole those emergency generators and for the reporters said to have masqueraded as family members to get into the hospital is to stick them in the stocks beneath a teetering gothic revival tower. There are periods of confidence and periods of despondency. Today, on day eight, I sense a belief in my neighbourhood that our little village can be remade. And there is a profound new awareness around the city of how vital local communities are, of how we must nourish and nurture them, 15

and never again allow them to be neglected by busyness and laziness. Our friend Tony, who lives in the next street, says this is how it must be: we will rebuild the city, village by village. But there is so much worse to come. We don’t yet have the names of all those who have perished, and we will know more people on that yet-to-be published list. And so many people have seen so much terror. There are those who, from their office windows, saw the CTV building collapse before their very eyes. There are people who ran for their children through streets where people lay fallen; there are those who have seen others just feet away from them crushed by falling masonry; those who have rushed to give aid to the dead and dying. There are times when it seems that this will surely be too much for a little city to bear. And then there is the physical task. People who are working inside the cordon every day say the CBD is decimated, its infrastructure shattered, and that – aside from the leaning Hotel Grand Chancellor – other relatively modern high-rises are terminally damaged. It is somehow of little comfort that the Institution of Professional Engineers is reminding its members that the building code is based on international best practice and is designed to deal with the sort of seismic event that will happen every 500 years or so, but that this one was three times that. Thousands of businesses need to be relocated before they can trade again, and even if premises can be found for the most important employers in undamaged parts of the city, what of the small central city cafes and shops? Where will they go? And what of the little local strip of shops that have crumpled

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in places like Opawa, Richmond, Phillipstown, Linwood – what will become of them? The Government rescue package will help prop things up for now. But the TV crews will be long gone, Geoff and Simon will be broadcasting Morning Report as normal from Wellington, and the international media will have moved to the next disaster by the time the jobs start disappearing. I stumble unexpectedly upon fragments of information that tell of the dreadful burden to come. A neighbour who is an orthopaedic registrar at the hospital says people with traumatic crush injuries, of which they have treated many, will require perhaps six or seven further operations. He says about half of Christchurch’s house surgeons – the workhorses of the hospital – are foreigners. He fears that when their contracts roll over – mostly in August – many will leave, and many of those signed up to come will stay away. We have asked ourselves 'will we stay?' We have asked our friends and neighbours 'will you stay?' Some won’t: young people who don’t own property and have portable skills may feel no tie here; others who have support networks elsewhere, who are renters rather than owners and who simply can’t bear the shaking and the trauma will see no sense in staying. But for most of us, even if we thought we wanted to go, there really isn’t a choice. We are economically tied to this solemn place by the fact that our biggest personal asset is here, in the hands of insurers and almost certainly unsaleable. We are emotionally tied here by our neighbours and friends and family. And so we will hold each other up, and we will keep going.

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But we need a vision of what will be. We need it to be believable and powerfully led, and we need to know the order of progress on the long, long road ahead. Where should the CBD go? What of the suburbs that are swallowed up in liquefied silt? How will we redesign the way we live, so that we are pulled closer to one another and to a rebuilt city? Which few treasures from our architectural heritage shall we decide to salvage and repair as the symbols of our humanity, self-belief and endurance – for shall we not need an eternal spring from which to draw these strengths? We know from our five-month apprenticeship following 4 September that we hadn’t properly grasped any of this before, and that things were bumbling and drifting. Most of us had forgotten that the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission – set up by the Government after 4 September – even existed, let alone known what it was thinking of doing. We need something far more convincing, something that will set us on the right path for the decades to come. Something that can help us hold together, and can bang heads together. Something that will listen to our good sense, but with the good sense to ignore our small-minded, petty, parochial squabbles. Something that will help us reach for what we all want and need – strong villages that will heal us, strong buildings that we can trust and a strongly beating city heart.

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We are just shattered 19 March 2011 It’s early Monday morning – day 13 – and a frigid southerly is still dragging its tail through the streets of Christchurch. After the desiccating nor’wester of last week, it rained hard on Saturday night and through most of Sunday, turning Waitaki St, in the suburb of Bexley, into a series of putrid ponds. Silt shovelled from roads and around houses sits in big piles on the kerbside waiting to be collected by trucks. The rain has turned the residue on footpaths and gutters into a gluey grey muck. A lone motorcycle policeman pulls into the street and picks his way carefully around the flooded craters before dismounting. Listener photographer David White and I have parked our push-bikes so as to better absorb the bleak desolation that surrounds us. The constable eyes us up cautiously. The three of us are the only people on the street. We are surrounded by empty houses, many of them leaning slightly to one side, sunk on their foundations or cracked through their brickwork. The policeman, Senior Constable Davitt Lavery, tells us he thinks only about four people are still in residence here. He wears a look of strain and says of himself and his colleagues: 'We are just shattered.'

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He is calling to check on his 74-year-old friend, Brian Frisken, who lives in Mitcham Place, a small adjacent cul-de-sac, and has been without power, water and sewerage for almost two weeks. We, too, decide to drop in on Brian, and find he’s doing well in very trying circumstances. Tall, ramrod-straight and with a memorably firm handshake, Brian was watching True Grit at the Reading Cinema in the nearby suburb of Shirley when the earthquake hit. Mattie Ross had just fallen into the snake pit, and Rooster Cogburn had not yet rescued her. 'I missed the climax,' he says. 'I’ll have to go and see it again.' Bits of the cinema roof rained down, leaving him with a massive purple bruise on his leg. It took two-and-a-half hours in chaotic traffic to drive the short distance home, which was surrounded by sludge. His car ended up in a hole, and he had to wade through the gluggy stuff up to his knees. He dug out the car and shovelled the silt from around his house, although an army of farmers from Matamata and Te Puke turned up a few days later to help. 'Marvellous,' he says. 'I sent them next door to my neighbour.' He has been provided with a chemical toilet that sits on his back porch, and which he empties into deep holes in the garden. He gets water from New Brighton; his children have furnished him with gas cooking equipment; and he showers and does his washing at his brother’s place in Woolston. Later on that Monday night, Lavery popped back in with a small generator, and we learn on Tuesday morning the power has been restored. He feels well-supported, and says families with young children who have lost their homes face much greater hardship. Still, he says, it’s been 'eerie at night with no power.

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Every little noise, you wonder. But I keep myself busy. I’ve been cutting the hedges and keeping the place tidy.' The EQC has declared the small house liveable. It certainly looks more solid than many, although the brickwork is cracked and it seems to have jumped about 10cm from its rightful position. Frisken sometimes pops over the Avon River (effectively an open sewer since the quake destroyed sewerage pipes and pump stations on this side of town) for a sausage sizzle or stir-fry, which are among the services provided in New Brighton by local churches. At Central New Brighton School, the Grace Vineyard Church in partnership with the New Brighton police established a 'pop-up' food bank the day after the quake. Because the local supermarket was unable to open, people without transport had no way of getting food or water, explains Glenn France, a church member and one of an energetic throng of volunteers. Food has been sent in from around the country – one truck driver from Taupo called for donations in his hometown and had a full load within half an hour; another man drove a party bus full of food from Wellington. France says the plan is to scale back the operation when the local Countdown gets up and running again. He estimates that, at its peak, the food bank was feeding 10,000 people a day. One of those in the queue today is Barbara Kerr, whose Aranui household of five is without power and water, and whose street has no portaloo. They can’t easily access the internet for essential information, either, because their laptop was crushed by a falling bookcase. Their car was ruined by

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rising silt as they fled the Palms shopping mall on 22 February. Having lived in Christchurch for seven years, they’ve decided to get out. They plan to sell their damaged house and head home to Australia. 'It [the house] was worth $240,000 in normal times, but we will probably get $80,000. The buyer will get the insurance policy and EQC number,' she says. Outside the foodbank the queue has lengthened and people are hunched against the squally weather. It’s a desolate scene. So is the empty New Brighton shopping centre further down the street. Nothing is open and a security guard tells me only a handful of shops have managed to trade in the last fortnight. The Quiksilver surf shop was badly looted in the hours after the quake because they couldn’t close their doors. As the morning wears on, the sun breaks through and the mood lifts. By lunchtime the atmosphere on the street feels like a Saturday farmers’ market. There’s free food and drink, and people are milling around and chatting. A wireless hotspot has been set up so that people without services at home can get online. Outside a natural remedies shop Graham O’Gorman is offering free stress-relief and immune-boosting sessions with his “bioptron light therapy” machine, which projects coloured light beams onto my forehead. I tell him it sounds like hocus-pocus, but he’s not offended and says he’s been using it to help the police, fire crews and forensic teams involved in the recovery operation. As we head back through Aranui towards the CBD, we bump into a big group digging silt out of a backyard in an otherwise-deserted Shortland St. Even now, two weeks on, there are still properties to be cleared of the effects of

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liquefaction. The leaders of this volunteer effort are Alofa Noa, the pastor of the Faith and Life Changing Ministry, and his wife, Se’epa Fa’aoso-Noa. As well as barrowing out masses of silt, they’ve released the homeowner’s stranded car from the muck. 'He was really grateful,' says Se’epa. She and her husband have taken three extra families into their home since the quake, even though they have no power, water or nearby portaloo. Twenty-two people – including five children under five – are sharing their three-bedroom house. She says some may eventually be able to return to their own homes, but “at the moment they feel more secure with us. We are just learning to get on and be content.” This week, Prime Minister John Key said 10,000 houses in Christchurch may have to be demolished, and some suburbs badly affected by silt may be abandoned. Some 100,000 houses are said to be damaged but no one yet knows the true extent of the wreckage because these houses have had little more than a cursory inspection and evaluation of land has barely begun. Some abandoned houses may be patched up and made liveable again, and some that are still occupied may turn out to be structurally unsafe. Everything is changing and uncertain, and every day brings a new version of reality. But the vicious southerly that ripped through the city over the weekend is a reminder of the one solid fact in this whole violent upheaval. Winter is coming. And we don’t yet know where all the people who can no longer live in their own homes will spend the dark months ahead. Mayor Bob Parker says there is ample land around the city green belt for new housing. But it will take months or probably years to launch new subdivisions. What about the

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next few weeks, when displaced people look to leave the temporary shelter of friends, family and the farther-flung locations to which many fled in the aftermath? Where will people sleep, cook their dinner and do their homework when Christchurch is clamped in the grim jaws of June, July, August and September? Civil Defence chief John Hamilton says there is a range of options. They want to avoid, 'at all costs', having people in tents. Construction of temporary 'bach-like' buildings is a possibility, although there is no word on where or how long it will take. Housing Minister Phil Heatley says where displaced people can’t find their own place to live, the Government could lease camper vans and cabins in holiday parks and rent these out. 'We are conscious of the whole issue of not creating ghettos, and we don’t want to lock up land with temporary housing where more permanent housing may be suited,' he told Radio NZ National’s Morning Report. Parker says people may need to make temporary repairs to, and move back into, homes they might now think are uninhabitable – including, presumably, some of those his own council has declared unsafe by tagging with yellow or red stickers. But there are now questions over how much the council can and should spend on repairing smashed-up sewerage and water infrastructure in suburbs the Prime Minister thinks will be abandoned. Parker says the council intends to repair all infrastructure 'where is, but if the EQC and their consultants come back with a different approach, obviously we will start planning for that'.

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It seems for every monumental 'if' there is a cascade of 'buts' and 'maybes'. In the meantime, people in undamaged areas will need to chip in, Parker says. 'Some parts of the city are less damaged than others. You need to do an assessment – if you have a shed or building out the back, or some temporary housing, what can you do for the people in the most damaged areas? We have had a great response from our communities. We need to keep that up. It’s essential at this time.' Tui Fa’asina is taking no chances. Since the quake she, husband Fili and two-month-old baby Samuel have been living in a tent on the lawn of their flat in Salisbury St in the central city. Tui was downstairs and Samuel was asleep upstairs in his cot when the earthquake ripped cracks through the walls and upended the kitchen. They borrowed a tent, which they have furnished with bed, table and TV. Power supply to the flat has been uninterrupted throughout, so they have been able to run a cable from the building. They had water to the house from day five, enabling them to wash and use the toilet. Everything in the tent is neat and tidy, but Tui is looking forward to moving soon into the home of her uncle’s boss, who has offered them spare bedrooms at his house in Rolleston, just south of Christchurch and near her husband’s work at The Warehouse’s distribution centre. She is grateful they still have an income. Their aim is to get a deposit together and buy in Rolleston. One thing is certain, she says: 'We can’t stay here.'

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Blast those barriers 2 April 2011 Gerald Westenra went along to last Friday’s Christchurch earthquake memorial service, listened to his daughter Hayley lift the spirits of his city with her pure rendition of Amazing Grace, and had a quiet word in the ear of Prime Minister John Key about the difficulties businesses in town were having getting access to essential records and tools locked up behind the CBD cordon. Three days later the central city jeweller was among those who breached the 'red zone' defences, as frustration boiled over into civil disobedience. Shut out of their livelihoods for a month by all-powerful Civil Defence authorities and with no idea of when they might be able to get going again, entrepreneurs turned into shouting activists. The police berated them for endangering lives – and it’s true that a couple of firebrands hightailed it up Hereford St, pursued by cops on bikes – but the suggestion of reckless risk-taking was just plain silly. The demonstrators strode past the bored soldiers who man the big cordon fences, and most of them simply wandered about 200m down the Avon River side of Oxford Tce – far from any crumbling masonry – before being threatened with arrest and herded back out of the cordon by a small phalanx of police who appeared from the Hereford St headquarters.

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Westenra had no intention of doing anything dangerous, nor does he relish being seen as a troublemaker, but he wanted to make the point that he’s a grown-up capable of mature risk-assessment. And the way he and many others see it, he faces greater risk of serious injury to his livelihood by being indefinitely barred from his Cashel St premises than he does from the risk of physical injury if he makes an informed 15-minute dash inside to retrieve essential equipment and records. All he wants is the chance to carry on his business selling and valuing jewellery from the new location he has secured. 'We’re not asking to risk people’s lives. We just want a realistic plan,' he says. The building he is not allowed near, he adds, kept him safe on 22 February. They’ve been cast as an impatient rabble, but those who line up with Westenra include accountants who have resorted to subterfuge to smuggle servers out of central city premises, property developers who live in fear their buildings will be torn down without their knowledge, and self-made business people who see the fruits of their labour shrivelling with every day they are barred from gathering up the pieces of their enterprises and getting started elsewhere. Restaurant and cafe owners know that inside their idle fridges and freezers is putrefying food; and the smell of rotting garbage around the streets of the CBD suggests the widely circulating rumour of a rat infestation may not be without foundation. David Collins, who owns three properties in inner-city High St, spends his life interpreting the labyrinthine Resource Management Act as a council hearings commissioner on complex developments. He granted consent for the magnificent glass-fronted Art Gallery that has been

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commandeered as Civil Defence headquarters; he couldn’t go to the business owners’ protest on Monday because he was busy running a hearing on rezoning land at Wigram that will be essential for the rebuilding of Christchurch. But he and his tenants – including a chic restaurant and high-end fashion shops – are beside themselves with worry and frustration. It makes no sense to him that sundry visiting dignitaries and assorted journalists are given guided tours of the badly damaged inner city, while the property owners and business people who are the economic lifeblood of the place haven’t been allowed so much as a glimpse of their assets. Civil Defence boss John Hamilton says it’s very dangerous in the CBD. 'So how come William Windsor was able to wander about without a hard hat the other day?' asks Collins. It’s not easy to criticise the agencies that did such a marvellous job in the early days of the crisis, but four weeks on Collins depicts Civil Defence as 'the barbarians at the gate' of the CBD. Moreover, he thinks the agency is going beyond its powers, acting as 'town planner for Christchurch, deciding which buildings should go and how we will do it'. Collins says he has been told by one official that his buildings – from which his tenants and their customers escaped unscathed – faced no imminent danger of demolition; and he’s been told by another that they are among a row of buildings likely to be demolished. He’s been told by one person his buildings are red-stickered from the February earthquake; and he’s been told by someone else that they are red-stickered only because of proximity to another building that failed in the Boxing Day quake (and which has since been pulled down).

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'We just don’t know what they are doing. I’d at least like to get in there and spray-paint the phone number on the building so they have no excuse not to contact me. I’m not asking to go back in and occupy the buildings – I just want to grab laptops and a few files. My tenants just want their files and they want to secure sensitive documents. It would take five minutes. Maybe if we had a bit longer we’d get some furniture so that we could operate from home.' Pick up the phone and talk to any number of small central-city businesses, and the complaint is the same. No time frame, poor communication, inconsistent information. And, for many, no cash flow. Joe and Nicky Arts, a brother-and-sister team behind Arts the Printers in High St, have spent $250,000 strengthening their building to 100% of the building code on the ground floor and were in the process of completing similar strengthening of the top floor when the earthquake hit. The building is standing solid. But they haven’t been able to retrieve the paperwork they need to invoice their customers, secure their collection of rare type or collect printing plates and other materials that would allow them to keep going – let alone get in and finish the engineering work on the building that would ensure it survived if the damaged neighbouring building was demolished. Cash flow for their 50-year-old business – set up by their parents after they emigrated from the Netherlands after the war – is 'munted', says Nicky Arts. They have laid off one of their three part-timers and will probably have to let a second one go soon. All because, they allege, of a 'nanny state' response from the authorities. 'We can’t make a decision about our own safety,' says Joe Arts, who, as a prominent member of the climbing community, is accustomed to assessing safety risks in the mountains.

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And although Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee declared a wish after 22 February to get rid of 'old dunger' buildings that had endangered or taken lives, the most intractable problems in the CBD seem to surround modern high-rises that have failed. Andrew and Adele Wheeley’s homewares shop, Whare, in Lichfield St, bears a green sticker, indicating the building is probably sound. But they are blocked from entering because it is in the shadow of the Grand Chancellor Hotel, which is on a precarious lean. No one knows how long it will be before the 27-storey hotel is demolished. The Wheeleys have retrieved stock from their second shop in the suburb of Beckenham (which is red-stickered only because the poorly maintained neighbouring building fell against theirs) and hope to start selling online and perhaps through a 'pop-up' shop. But their insurance company, State, won’t pay out on Lichfield St until they have a declaration of 'irretrievability' from some unknown authority. Even the mighty Ballantynes department store is paralysed because of the Grand Chancellor. Executive director Richard Ballantyne says the shop is as it was left on 22 February. Staff and management haven’t been able to get in to tidy up, nor have they been able to get the building inspected by engineers. He says business people are naturally getting frustrated, 'but when you have been through the city, as some of us have, and see that the devastation is so huge, you can understand why officials are being cautious'. Patience is called for, he says; it’s estimated the store could be closed for six to nine months.

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On the other side of the CBD, the multi-storey Copthorne Hotel on Durham St is also leaning and unstable, and casts its own pall over that part of the city. The nearby Convention Centre and Town Hall – operated by Christchurch City Council company V-Base – are closed and have suffered damage, but engineers have not been allowed in to do an assessment because of the tight cordon around the Copthorne. And, on the subject of 'old dungers', nightclub owner Bruce Williamson squarely accuses the Christchurch City Council of negligence in its attitude towards buildings that were damaged in the September earthquake. His building – home to the popular Ministry nightclub, which he calls 'a 20-year work of passion' – has been damaged because the unstrengthened building next door fell onto it on 22 February. This wouldn’t have happened, he says, if the council hadn’t allowed the weakened building to remain standing – and be reoccupied – after September. He argues the council’s management post-4 September needs to be part of the commission of inquiry into the earthquake. He has been developing plans to demolish damaged parts of his building and do modifications on other parts, in order to get his business back on its feet. On Monday morning, however, he was told the place was tagged for demolition; that afternoon, he vented his rage at the protest outside Civil Defence headquarters and was among those who stormed the cordon. Since then, he says, he has been getting emails and phone calls from the authorities that had previously ignored him, and 'it seems the assessment on my building has changed'. Not everyone is sympathetic to the protesting entrepreneurs, and not all the news is bad for small businesses. Stu Waddel,

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whose Chill Studio is also in the shadow of the Grand Chancellor, is unimpressed with the quality of communication from the Canterbury Business Recovery service, but thinks this week’s protest was disrespectful of those who have done so much to help the city through its trauma. Peter Townsend, boss of the Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce, muttered on Tuesday as he ushered the protesters into a closed meeting with Civil Defence, that their actions were 'a diversion of resources'. 'We’ll get it sorted,' he snapped. Out on the western side of town, big firms such as Tait Electronics are helping out displaced businesses (including the University of Canterbury’s engineering school and CTV, whose building catastrophically collapsed) by offering space at its big manufacturing campus. Other businesses like photographers and technology firms have snuggled up together in shared premises, or are working in pods from private homes. And by the end of this week Civil Defence estimated it would have overseen 'controlled access' to 500 businesses with green- or yellow-stickered buildings. Meantime, City Centre Business Association manager Paul Lonsdale is working on a plan that’s reminiscent of Napier’s Tin Town – the temporary CBD that stood for several years while the city was rebuilt after the 1931 earthquake. Lonsdale thinks mobile structures such as portacoms, which could be moved around as rebuilding progresses, could be artfully used to create a funky retail destination. 'We want to spark people’s imagination, and as long as people feel safe they will support it.'

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The Government’s financial assistance for business, including $145 million in wage subsidies and the newly announced $2.5 million fund to assist 'strong but earthquake-affected businesses' will help some, as will the $1.7 million for 'earthquake recovery co-ordinators'. Nevertheless, says Townsend, there will be hundreds of businesses that don’t make it, and the Retailers Association estimates one in 10 shops in town will shut down. And some of those that fail will undoubtedly go down arguing that, if only they had been allowed to assess their own risks and granted timely access to their property, they would have survived.

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Read all about it 18 April 2011 Two days after February’s earthquake Vicki Hyde’s mother, Kathleen O’Reilly, disappeared. O’Reilly lives just around the corner from Hyde, her husband, Peter, and their three children in the suburb of Redcliffs. Late on the Thursday night two days after the quake, the police turned up at the Hydes’ house to order their evacuation because of fears of rockfall from the cliffs behind the suburb. They were told 79-year-old O’Reilly had been evacuated, too, but no one knew where she’d been taken. They assumed she was in safe hands, and gathered up a few possessions and headed to a friend’s house, unsure if or when they would be allowed home. Next morning, the cordon had been moved behind both their house and O’Reilly’s, and there seemed to be nothing to stop them going home. They asked the lone policeman manning the barrier where evacuees had been taken. He didn’t know, but suggested they try one of the temporary welfare centres. So they headed off to a chaotic Cowles Stadium in the eastern suburb of Aranui and hunted for O’Reilly there. No luck. They tried Pioneer Stadium, in the southern suburb of Spreydon. Nothing. No one seemed to have a list of evacuees.

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They got home to find a note from O’Reilly. It turned out she had been taken around the block to the local bowling club, and had spent the night worrying about their whereabouts. The Hydes figured their experience of the information vacuum was probably typical of many. The authorities were telling people to check for information on websites, but that was no use to households without power; 0800 numbers had been set up, but cellphone batteries were dead or dying. Decisions made by one agency were sometimes obviated by the actions of another (for instance, a water tank was delivered to Redcliffs School, but it was sealed off behind a cordon). The two-way flow of information between neighbourhoods and authorities the Hydes expected to be channelled through Civil Defence sector posts wasn’t happening. So on day three they carted a noticeboard, paper and pens, table and gazebo from their home to the main road through Redcliffs. They parked their nascent 'Redcliffs InfoPoint' on the footpath next to a generator powering a Telecom cellphone tower, from which it was discovered cellphones could be charged. Soon, locals were stopping to pin information to the noticeboard and plug their phones into the generator. On day four the Hydes lugged a printer down to their pop-up communications enterprise and plugged it into the generator; the following day they published the first Redcliffs news-sheet. It was full of useful information: warnings about the sewage leak near the terminally damaged local New World; where to go for food and petrol; whether it was okay to flush the toilet; lost and found pets.

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Workers from lines company Orion set up alongside the InfoPoint and passed on street-by-street updates on when power was likely to be restored – information that helped stressed families decide whether to stay put or bail. A security worker employed to guard the New World became an integral part of the operation, with locals passing him information, which he passed on to the Hydes. When their power came back on (day eight) they tapped into more traditional forms of social media: the news-sheet was posted online; Peter blogged; and they put the word out through their networks for goods to help the hard-hit and under-serviced eastern suburbs. By 27 March they had published eight editions of the news-sheet. Nearly eight weeks on, the Hydes are refocusing on their website and software business and other locals have taken over the InfoPoint. But the need for reliable information to help people achieve a semblance of order in a disordered city hasn’t gone away. And the lesson from the information vacuum is clear: to help communities through future disasters, says Peter Hyde, emergency services need to focus much more on local information flows. 'If you do that, communities will support themselves, but they’ll be able to do it more effectively, and in turn the emergency services will be much more efficient.'

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Enter the red zone 18 May 2011 It doesn’t stink in Christchurch’s CBD any more. The last time I was escorted into the cordoned red zone – the heart of the city, bounded by Oxford Tce and the Avon River, St Asaph St and Madras St – the smell of uncollected garbage and rotting food left by fleeing café owners was gagging. That was in week three. Word is that it continued getting worse for weeks afterwards. Fish shop owner Ange Leonard described to me in vivid terms how, after a couple of months, the stock in her Manchester St shop would have turned into a foul liquid emitting toxic ammonia. But CERA’s Warwick Isaacs, who guided us through the broken streets on Friday, week 11, says a big effort has been made in the last couple of weeks to purge the red zone of rotting putrescibles. It seems like some kind of progress at least: it remains a scene of overwhelming destruction, but at least it’s not crawling with maggots. And, compared with two months ago, there’s a little more orderliness about the streets, which are silent and deserted but for the occasional scraping of excavators and the movement of workers in high visibility vests amongst the rubble. Bricks that showered down from facades have been swept back into coherent heaps, and the dusty roads sprinkled with water. And some buildings have simply vanished: the TVNZ building; the elegant ANZ Chambers, the Edwardian flagship of the 37

High St boutique zone; Charlie B’s backpackers and Stonehurst hotel on the corner of Gloucester and Madras; St Pauls church in Madras St, with its four striking stone columns; sundry brick buildings that are noticeable only in their absence. And, of course, the desolate charred remains of the CTV building. I’m not suggesting any of these demolitions were wrong or avoidable. But it is strange to live in a city where the heart is undergoing such savage surgery, hidden from view behind the hermetic seal of the cordon. Bishop Victoria Matthews talked weeks ago of how we would mourn the loss of the familiar, and it’s true – you look up and expect to see the elegant Avonmore building on the corner of Latimer Square, and find the place eliminated; you expect to feel the dour frontages of Manchester St at your shoulder, and instead there is a pile of smashed kindling, twisted metal and broken bricks. The other big change last Friday was the brutal honesty of the officials, pointing out high-rise after high-rise with terminal damage. It’s these buildings, not the maligned unreinforced masonry buildings, that raise the risk of paralysis in the CBD for months or years. There’s the famous Grand Chancellor, slumped against the neighbouring All Seasons Hotel and on such a lean that it looks comical. There’s the Victoria Apartments and Craigs building, side by side in Armagh St and both leaning in opposite directions. There’s the Clarendon Towers, where the staff of law firms were stuck for hours on 22 February because a chunk of the stairwell failed. There’s the Westpac Tower in Cashel St, and Securities House and the Harcourts buildings in Madras St – all of them doomed, and all of them undoubtedly complex demolition jobs. And that’s without counting those high rises

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about which no decision has yet been made – the Brannigans building in Oxford Tce, the Forsyth Barr building on the corner of Colombo and Armagh – built with great fanfare by Bob Jones in the late '80s, but where the stairwell failed disastrously – the Farmers carpark in Oxford Tce. Isaacs says 900 buildings in the CBD are to come down, and is demanding owners produce their demolition plans within 10 days or the job will be done for them and the bill will be in the mail. CERA has sweeping powers on its side, but each one of these maimed buildings represents a potential collision of interests between property owners who may be under-insured, insurance companies who may argue damaged buildings are repairable or look for other ways to delay paying out, and a population torn between grief for what is lost and an urgent need for progress and hope.

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Christchurch is struck again 25 June 2011 There was a message from a friend on my answerphone on Tuesday morning: 'We’re over this crap, but we’re not.' Which sums things up about as accurately as anything I’ve heard. In the innocence of life before September, I thought natural disasters were singular events that came with violence, created their mayhem, then left people to tidy up and rebuild their homes. Now I know the violence is just the preamble to a long journey into uncertainty, disorientation, powerlessness and grief. After four months, our home is the same bashed-up, uninhabitable mess it was on the afternoon of 22 February; a battered fly caught in an impenetrable web of loss adjusters, engineers, builder-estimators, geotechnical experts and overlapping agencies. Like most people we know, we haven’t received a dollar of the $115,000 we are owed by the EQC, and our insurance company is urging patience while the glacial 'process' of assessments is worked through. All around our neighbourhood are fallen-down or structurally damaged homes that, like ours, await answers and action. After weeks of getting up every day with the urge to fight, describe, record, interpret and help make things better, I have lately felt a sense of frustration, loss and – often – rage. By

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Monday morning I had come to the realisation that if I was going to last this long, rocky journey, it was time to take a few days off, get some rest and recalibrate my expectations. My first step was to go for a run in the bright midday sun. I heard the growling rumble first, then felt the ground bucking and saw the cabbage trees on the riverbank swaying wildly. There was nothing to be done but pause, look around, run home and swing into the familiar routine of texting family members and friends, turning on the radio and reassuring distant whanau. When the 6.3 quake kicked at 2.20pm, I got under my desk and shouted at it to stop. The desk – not the solid old wooden one that had protected me on 22 February, but a flimsier one – was getting flung around and our rented house bounced about as if it was built on foundations made of Swiss balls. Then, once again, the texting (mostly unsuccessful because of overloaded lines), the radio, the wondering what to do next, the worrying about those who didn’t reply. In September and February, I was compelled to get about the city to see everything for myself – to report, photograph and comprehend what had happened to us. Not this time. On Monday I had no urge to press against the edge of the cordon to see the already devastated city centre further brutalised, or to bike through the eastern suburbs to witness their terrible new engulfment. It is all too crushingly familiar. And so I went to our house and our street, where things were as I expected: the same battered mess, just worse; the same ripped and scoured footpath and road, just worse; the same handful of neighbours who have managed to make their homes habitable, just more dazed than before.

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We all say to one another that we have 'had enough', and ask rhetorically 'when will it end?', but this is just Christchurch small talk. We can wish for it to end, but there is no choice but to comfort each other and keep going into the unknown. Any expectations we once had about when normality might return are frayed and forgotten. As I write this, a day-and-a-half after Monday’s 6.3, things remain – to steal a line from my former Listener colleague Philip Matthews, now a writer at the Press – utterly disrupted and utterly normal at the same time. This morning I kept an appointment with my optician for a regular check-up; she was open as usual, but most of the nearby shops that had reopened were again shut and the view from her waiting room was now of a rubble-strewn lot where once stood a row of brick offices and rumpty stores. We exchanged pleasantries about where we had been the previous afternoon, and chatted about whether the side of the lovely old stone building on the corner had collapsed in the day before’s shakes or if it was older damage. Just down the road, the Opawa shops, where I used to take my bikes for servicing and browse for second-hand clothes, fell in a heap on Monday, but the hideous yellow eyesore just up the road, which has loomed damaged and abandoned since September, remains upright. In the red zone, it’s reported that dozens of previously intact buildings will have to come down and the two cathedrals have sustained yet further damage, but the ugly leaning Grand Chancellor stubbornly stands. There is no justice in this thing. Today they told us Monday’s earthquakes came from yet another newly confirmed fault line, and that the probability of

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further major aftershocks has increased. Yes, we are over this crap, but it’s not over. Numbly, we carry on.

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Hard yards: The plight of Canterbury landowners 9 July 2011 Brian Frisken’s earthquake has been, he says, 'a bit of a struggle'. Indeed, a less robust person than the 75-year-old former seaman might have buckled under the strain of the past few months. Soon after the 22 February quake, his wife, Marjorie, a resident of the badly damaged Churchill Courts rest home in the suburb of Shirley, was evacuated from Christchurch. Frisken vividly remembers the day she and the other frail and elderly residents of the home were airlifted away. 'It was a dreadful day. They were all sitting there in the lounge and there wasn’t a word. They knew something was going on, but there wasn’t a word. It was heartbreaking.' Marjorie ended up in Dunedin at 11.30 that night, and she hasn’t been back to Christchurch since. Frisken, who used to visit her every day from their Bexley home of 30 years, made the long drive south to see her, but it was almost too much for him – and his car, which struggled over Kilmog Hill, north of Dunedin, in the rain. Thankfully, the Canterbury District Health Board later came to the rescue with a scheme for family members of the hundreds of elderly residents of damaged rest homes who

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have been shifted elsewhere in the country. Every Thursday he is flown to Dunedin to visit Marjorie, an arrangement for which he is enormously grateful. In the meantime, life at his small home on the banks of the Avon River has been inconvenient and difficult. When the Listener first met him after the February quake, he had just carted a huge volume of silt from his section, his street was almost impassable as a result of damage caused by liquefaction, and he was without power, running water or sewerage. It was a month before electricity was restored and he went four months without sewerage, reliant on a chemical toilet that he emptied into holes in his garden. Three weeks ago Christchurch City Council installed a temporary sewage holding tank in his street, which enabled him to use his toilet for the first time since 22 February. That first flush, he recalls, 'was bliss'. EQC assessors told him his house, which was shunted several centimetres sideways in the February quake, would have to be rebuilt, although he has not received his pay-out from the agency. Shortly after the EQC visit, an assessor from his insurance company, State, told him the place could be jacked up, repiled and repaired for $66,000. When the 5.6 quake struck on 13 June, he was playing golf. He went straight home to check on his property and clean up. While he was vacuuming, the 6.3 quake struck and threw him out of the open lounge door onto his deck. As he sat recovering and texting his granddaughter, he heard the glug-glug-glug sound of silt oozing up around his house – again.

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'I just watched it. It was heartbreaking.' He thought, 'It can stay there', but his daughter and her boyfriend came and cleaned up the worst of it. His street is once again a smashed-up quagmire. By the time the Government announced the results of investigations into land damage in Christchurch’s eastern suburbs and colour-coded the city into red (areas to be abandoned), orange (still to be decided), green (no problems) and white (waiting for geotechnical analysis), Frisken was already resigned to the fact his land was not viable for rebuilding. Because he is a homeowner in the residential red zone, the Government’s buy-out package presents him with two options: either sell the land and house to the Government at the 2007 rating valuation ($222,000); or sell only his 353sq m section to the Government at the rating valuation of $82,000 and pursue his house claim with his insurance company. Although he is yet to receive a detailed assessment from State, he fears it will offer only the $66,000 that the company’s assessor told him it would cost to repair the house, rather than full replacement. Both options are likely to leave him with a pay-out that falls short of what it will cost to either buy another small one- or two-bedroom home, or a section to build a replacement house on. And, he says, as a retiree, he wouldn’t get a mortgage to cover the balance. 'So obviously I would have to rent. You’re between a rock and a hard place, especially at my age. There will be others in the same boat.' Many others, judging by the questions and concerns aired in the past few days at public meetings held throughout the red

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zone to explain the package. For those with modest houses on small sections in the east of the city, the value of their pay-out will scarcely meet the cost of a bare section elsewhere. CERA chief executive Roger Sutton has acknowledged the problem, and floated the possibility of using his sweeping powers to amend the city’s planning rules to ensure the release of small affordable sections onto the market. Meantime, Frisken is trying to get the answers he needs from State Insurance so he can make an informed decision. He intends to take his time over it, and remain – as he has been all these months – stoic: 'We’ve got to be strong about it and keep up with the game. It’s a bit of a struggle but we’ll get there.' At Kairaki Beach, near Kaiapoi, no one slept the night after the Government announcement that the tiny settlement of 60-odd houses must be abandoned. Unlike in Christchurch, the 4 September earthquake was a much more damaging event here than the 22 February shake. The old sewer main through the settlement was shattered, liquefaction caused damage to land, and many houses were severely battered. But by last week the community felt it was on the road to recovery. Waimakariri District Council (WDC) had just finished putting in a new $1.5 million sewer line, which also services the nearby Pines Beach settlement. The council had also rolled out plans to begin rebuilding in the Kaiapoi area, starting with Kairaki Beach. 'The council has been doing a fantastic job of getting ready to go,' says local resident Tim Stephenson. 'They were just about to get started.' Then Prime Minster John Key and Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee declared the area to be a red zone, saying its

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citizens would have to choose between the two standard options. None of the locals saw it coming – not even the WDC, whose officials were advised only half an hour before the Government announcement. 'Everyone was stunned,' says Stephenson. He and his wife, Ann Worthy-Stephenson, believe the decision is completely flawed and they have no intention of taking either buy-out option. They love their tight-knit village, which is clustered along Kairaki Beach’s single street, Featherston Ave, and where many properties have been in the same families for generations. Their beautiful new home overlooking Saltwater Creek was designed by Stephenson. It is built on 5.5m piles, with walls made from artfully formed pre-cast concrete panels. After nine months of earthquakes it is as solid as a rock – proof, he says, that the land is suitable for building, provided the right method is used. He has had an independent geotechnical engineer review the land data that Tonkin & Taylor collated for the EQC and the Government. The conclusion was that the soil at Kairaki Beach is some of the best suited for piled construction of any of the earthquake-affected zones. 'The answer is not to abandon the houses, but to rebuild with engineered solutions,' says Stephenson. 'It’s not hard to make a structure strong enough so it won’t be ripped apart in lateral spread.' The couple haven’t even bothered looking up their rating valuation to find out what they would get under the Government’s buy-out proposal because they are determined not to leave. 'It ain’t going to happen,' says Worthy-Stephenson. 'We ain’t going.'

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For Steve and Marie Davies, the new earthquake colour-coding means yet more waiting. They have already waited for nine months since their Reay Pl, Kaiapoi, home was torn in half by the September earthquake and their little cul-de-sac and the adjacent Courtenay Dr subdivision was savaged by the effects of liquefaction. Although there was more liquefaction in February, it wasn’t as severe as in September. As the year has worn on, the Davies have received encouraging signs of progress on their property. About a month ago their house was demolished, and they were expecting EQC to start repairing their damaged land in October. Waimakariri District Council had rolled out plans to install underground dams along the nearby Kaiapoi River bank to prevent lateral spreading of the ground in future quakes. Their insurer, AMI, had agreed to rebuild their house, and concept plans had been drawn up. 'We were hoping maybe we would be starting to build in December,' says Steve Davies. After months of renting in another part of town, they and their children had even been able to move back into their own street because an elderly neighbour decided to shift in with her daughter, enabling them to rent her damaged but repairable home. Then, on 14 June, the district council advised residents the Government had told it to halt its residential rebuilding programme because of new seismic information. A little more than a week later, the Davies and their neighbours got the news that their streets were zoned orange – which means further detailed assessment is required to determine if land repair is practical. Brownlee has promised the results of those

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investigations will be released over the coming 'weeks and months'. It was depressing news. 'With Kaiapoi, we were all set to go,' says Steve Davies. The family now face more uncertainty than ever. They are approaching the end of their 12 months of rental accommodation cover provided by their insurer. When that runs out, they will have to seek the Government’s rental subsidy for homeowners displaced by the earthquake. And they are well aware their orange-zoned land could end up being tagged red, forcing them to abandon their plans. Frustrating though this further delay is, Steve Davies says it’s important decisions are made on the best possible information. 'We don’t want to be building on land that won’t be insurable, so they have to get it right. It’s got to be safe.' And in the event their land is red-zoned, at least they know they will ultimately get a new house under their AMI insurance policy. Unlike red-zoned residents with repairable damage to their homes, to whom insurance companies say they will pay only the value of that repair work, even though the land is to be abandoned, the Davies are 'lucky – our house is written off'. And the rating value on their land is enough to enable them to buy a section elsewhere, says Steve Davies. 'The way I look at it you have to be grateful we live in New Zealand, and the people of New Zealand are doing this,' he says. 'If we were in Haiti or China it would be ‘your house is gone, move on’. It’s humbling to know that the country will look after its people. That’s what we’ve got to think about, rather than getting grumpy.'

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Christchurch 12 months on 3 September 2011 At 4.35am on a cold, clear Saturday a year ago, Christchurch and its hinterland was shaken from its slumber and thrust into an unstable new world that has brought terror and loss, resilience and rage, glimmers of progress and catastrophic setbacks. One year on from when it all began, and six months on from the devastation of 22 February, there is both optimism that New Zealand’s second-biggest city will eventually come back stronger than before, and fear that delay and paralysis could tip it into decline. For thousands of households it has been a time of impotent waiting and pending upheaval as they face the prospect of leaving homes, schools and neighbourhoods and starting again somewhere else. Thousands more are still waiting to learn if their properties are viable, or if they too must join the mass migration from condemned suburbs. And many thousands more wait for their insurers to decide whether the ground has stabilised enough to start the monumental job of fixing the city’s broken homes. Leanne Curtis and her family held out for almost a year in their wrecked Avonside home before finally moving into a rental on the northwest side of the city a couple of weeks ago. They had lived without sewerage since the February

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earthquake, reliant on a chemical toilet (a fancy name for what is really an oversized potty, requiring regular emptying by someone with strong arms and an even stronger stomach). Curtis, who emerged from the silt and chaos of September to become a key driver of the broad-based citizens’ group CanCERN, says the past 12 months have been a series of emotional 'bombs': the trauma of February, which brought death and devastation to the city; the setback of 13 June when she watched the road in front of her spew silt yet again; the land decisions; the financial implications of the red zone buy-out package. There have been times throughout all this when anger and frustration in the worst-affected communities have mounted to near-riotous levels, but calm has prevailed. 'Every time a bomb drops there is anger,' says Curtis. 'I don’t actually think that goes away, it’s just that you know that no amount of anger is going to change it … And then you get on and help yourself.' The shift away from her red-zoned home, and from the familiar spaces, routines and neighbourhood connections that have been sources of stability through the past 12 months, has been a wrench. Her heightened sense of vulnerability since the move is a sign of the massive social and emotional dislocation still to come, with 6000 red-zoned households being forced to move within the next 21 months, plus a yet-to-be revealed proportion of the 9000 orange-zoned properties and an unknown number of the 15,000-plus in the white zone that will eventually turn red. Curtis hears comments that displaced householders should 'harden up' and 'get over it'. But she fears that the

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dismemberment of entire communities means 'we have years ahead of us of real emotional struggle and stress. I think it’s a really long haul for people, and I don’t think that in any way are we at the point where we are starting to come through the other side.' Will she and her family stay in Christchurch? 'Don’t know. Because you start to think, ‘How much more do you change?’ I don’t actually feel capable of making those big choices at the moment.' For now, she is waiting to see what solutions emerge to problems of affordable land and housing for families whose properties have been condemned. Whereas some red-zoners have been able to quickly swoop on replacement land or houses, and some will do well out of the buy-out package, for many others the price differential between the cheaper eastern suburbs and the more expensive good land in the west presents a huge financial hurdle. Avonside’s Rev Mike Coleman has calculated – using valuations in Curtis’s street as a case study – that the average red-zoner will have to borrow $100,000 -200,000 for a replacement property in Christchurch, which he says is an impossible burden for many, particularly the elderly and low-income earners. Coleman had just paid off the mortgage on his red-zoned home, but had to take on a new $160,000 mortgage to buy another house on good land elsewhere. And as Christchurch East MP Lianne Dalziel points out, many red-zoners are now discovering that money they spent improving their homes may be 'down the drain'. For those with repairable homes who will be forced to accept the Government offer to buy both house and land at the current

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rating valuation, improvements such as a new $30,000 kitchen installed within the past two or three years will not be recognised in the price, unless it involved a consented increase in the floor area. There are also fears that for many red-zoners who choose the full Government buy-out package, the best option will be to take their cash and head to cheaper towns in New Zealand – or to Australia. High expectations have been held that Ngāi Tahu would come to the red-zoners’ rescue with affordable land developments. But Ngāi Tahu Property general manager Tony Sewell says it’s impossible to put even a small 125sq m home on a 400sq m section in Christchurch for under $320,000. The development costs alone – including design, council contributions, services and GST – come to $125,000, excluding the cost of the bare land. Another aspect of the problem is the extravagant cost of building materials in New Zealand – for instance, a sheet of Gib board costs twice as much here as in Australia. 'I can buy a bloody good home in Melbourne for $350,000,' Sewell says. The land and home affordability issue requires a collective solution from the Government, local bodies and the private sector, he argues. 'Ngāi Tahu is up to play its fair part, but we are not prepared to accept someone else’s risk.' For its part, the CERA seems disinclined to use its considerable powers to acquire land and develop cheaper lots for displaced citizens. 'We want to see what the market delivers first of all,' says Cera chief executive Roger Sutton. Despite fears to the contrary, Sewell insists there will be enough land to accommodate everyone who must move, and that red-zoners should not panic. 'I know for a fact there is

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enough land for 10,000 sections to be developed.' Ngāi Tahu alone has 3200 under development, he says. 'Be patient.' Patience: it’s a virtue that even those not ensnared in disruptive land decisions are being forced to exercise. In a city with at least 112,000 earthquake-damaged homes, homeowners on good land are also still waiting for the building to begin. Warwick Quinn, chief executive of the Registered Master Builders Federation, says builders are 'starting to get desperate' and he is beginning to hear of lay-offs in the city. 'The whole industry down there is grinding to a halt.' It’s estimated 30,000 more skilled workers will eventually be needed for the rebuild, but Quinn says the city is 'struggling to maintain capability in the meantime'. EQC chief executive Ian Simpson says at least 12,000 homes – and possibly twice that number – need repairs worth more than $100,000, or complete replacement. This work is in the hands of private insurance companies. A further 100,000 houses need repairs worth between $10,000 and $100,000, and will be fixed by Fletcher Construction under contract from EQC. Of the latter category, Fletcher’s chief executive infrastructure, Mark Binns, says work is under way or completed on 11,800 properties – just 12% of the total. He admits the company is not 'fully deploying' all the contractors it has accredited to do housing repairs, and says it has taken time to sort out 'issues' in getting claims processed through EQC and into a form that enables work to begin. But, he insists, 'We are in a ramp-up phase at the moment. I can assure you that EQC are on our case about solving problems and moving faster.'

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Canterbury Registered Master Builders Association president Richard Field says the industry is primarily surviving on the work coming through from Fletcher. The decision to red-zone 6000 properties has generated an increase in enquiries from households looking to rebuild. 'If it wasn’t for that, a lot of [builders] would have wondered how they were going to survive.' As for big home repair and rebuild jobs that are in the hands of private insurers, he says 'the money is not flowing … At the moment it is still a struggle to keep busy. Insurance is the biggest issue we’ve got. A lot of builders and clients are ready to build, but they can’t get insurance. It’s the same in commercial.' Further down the construction industry food chain, contractors such as electricians and joiners are treading water, trying to hang onto the staff they know they will eventually need, but battling to find enough work to pay the bills in the meantime. Canterbury Master Joiners president Nathan Moore says enquiries have picked up in the past few weeks, but some firms have had to lay off workers, or are working short days or four-day weeks. 'You can see the light at the end of the tunnel but we just can’t progress towards it.' Electrical Contractors Association president Lester Ballantine says electricians are 'holding their own, but that’s about it'. Although he’s optimistic the city will successfully recover, he thinks by the time homeowners settle with insurers, get plans drawn up and consents issued it could be 12 months before rebuilding work starts to flow. Although Simpson is adamant EQC is not waiting for the aftershocks to settle down before pushing ahead with

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permanent repair work, private insurers are holding back. They refuse to specify what level of seismic risk they are prepared to accept before ramping up the rebuild effort, so no one knows when the current state of paralysis will end. So far, AMI – the biggest domestic insurer in the city – has done construction work on fewer than 20 houses since September. Vero says it has 100 jobs under way or completed – described as a 'modest' percentage of total claims. Neither AA Insurance nor IAG (which owns State and NZI) will reveal how many repairs or rebuilds they have done, although IAG claims it has 'several hundred' under way. Insurers say they’ve been flat out assessing properties in the red zone, so those homeowners know what their options are under the buy-out package. And the insurers point out they can’t start work in areas of the city zoned orange or white, where decisions are yet to be made about the future of the land. Even some green-zoned areas – supposedly given the all-clear in the Government’s land announcement in June – are still subject to doubts about land stability, says AMI CEO John Balmforth. The executive manager of Vero’s earthquake response team, Peter Bloy, says his firm is willing to make a start on permanent repairs and rebuilds only where 'the risk of further damage is at the lowest end of the spectrum' in terms of proximity to fault lines, soil conditions and the seismic resistance of the building. 'We are preparing to move an increasing number of projects into the pre-construction phase,' says Bloy. But, like other insurers, the company doesn’t want to fix houses only to have them cracked or bent again in another aftershock. '[13] June

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produced ground accelerations at world-record levels, and seismologists are effectively saying we could have that scenario replicated any time over the next 12 months.' Bloy understands as well as anyone that families need their homes rebuilt – his own white-zoned property was shaken to pieces in February. 'But we have already had to re-repair some buildings twice, and in one case three times.' Master Builders’ Quinn says construction work is also being stalled by a freeze on contract works insurance for builders. (IAG says it will cover the rebuild of clients’ houses, but this is a modest promise, given it has built only one replacement house since September.) Even EQC had to negotiate for two months before it secured a deal with Lloyd’s of London for contract works insurance to cover the projects it will be undertaking through Fletcher. And although insurance companies claim they are supporting existing clients who want to move on from red-zoned properties and buy elsewhere in the region, they will transfer cover only if the homes being bought pass geotechnical and structural inspection – which rules out anything in the white or orange zones, and even in parts of the green zone. But some red-zoners are finding even if the property they have chosen ticks all the right boxes, their insurers are abandoning them. Rev Coleman, for instance, had to arrange insurance for the one-year-old home he bought through the vendor’s insurer, after his current insurer refused to cover the new house. Quite simply, insurers want to minimise their exposure to Christchurch, a city where – as the catchy saying in the industry goes – writing new policies that cover earthquake risk is like issuing fire insurance for a house that’s on fire.

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The insurance industry may be responding in an entirely rational manner to Christchurch’s seismic circumstances and geotechnical uncertainties, but it raises big questions: how long must the region wait until insurance firms decide it is safe to start rebuilding in earnest, and when will they return to a market that has prudently paid its premiums over the years? No one has the answers. Meanwhile, says Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce chief executive Peter Townsend, 'delay is a cancer' to the recovery. Everyone knows the region is in the midst of the biggest natural disaster in the nation’s history, and no one expects things to be normal. But he describes the insurance market as 'dysfunctional', and thinks there may be a temporary role for central government – 'some sort of interim role that they can play until things settle down a bit, because this delay, which is fundamentally driven by insurance – for valid reasons – is causing huge damage'. Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee, however, is hoping things will work themselves out. He says the insurers are being kept informed of the latest seismic and geotechnical data, and he believes 'they will be back in the market before too long'. He is insistent the city is in recovery. Many in the city dispute that assessment, but few are in any doubt he is in firm command of the government department set up to run the recovery – down to the most trivial detail: CERA’s corporate colours were originally to be Canterbury red and black, but his minders ordered a change to blue. He bats off suggestions things have stalled, or that affected communities are in danger of being disenfranchised from the recovery effort. When the Future Canterbury Network – a post-earthquake group of business and community leaders

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chaired by former National MP Philip Burdon (ironically, a director of insurance group IAG) – developed an accountability 'matrix' against which to measure key agencies’ progress towards recovery, Brownlee refused to allow CERA to participate. 'The sort of inaction, navel-gazing, hand-wringing nonsense that this crowd are on about I have no time for,' he booms. He and his department have all the accountability that is required, and 'in the end action speaks'. But Brownlee’s vision for how that action is unfolding is devastatingly uninspiring. On the six-month anniversary of the 22 February quake, he told One News: 'We are not quite making it up as we go along, but not far off that.' Insult to a year of injury: A Canterbury couple go 'back to square one' Tetumu Rolleston and Luana Belworthy waited almost a year after their home buckled and sank and Kaiapoi’s main sewer line expelled its contents onto their property. They and their seven children crammed into a two-room retirement village unit for seven months, before renting a quake-damaged five-bedroom house close to their own, whose owner had fled to Perth. Their insurance policy has covered the rent until now, but from next week they will have exhausted that provision in their contract. They will qualify for a Government accommodation allowance for displaced quake victims, but it falls well short of the rental. That, their normal mortgage repayments and the $500 a month it costs to heat a house that has neither a heat pump nor fireplace are causing immense stress.

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Earlier in the year, the local Waimakariri District Council developed plans to fix Kaiapoi’s damaged land and rebuild the houses. Rolleston and Belworthy drew up plans for a new home on their 850sq m section. The first phase of the rebuild was all set to go when, out of the blue, the Government ordered a stop to the plan, and once again they and more than 1200 other households in the town were in limbo. Last Thursday, Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee came to Kaiapoi to announce the fate of their property and that of the town’s other orange-zoned homes. Hoping to hear the details first hand, Rolleston and others turned up at the Kaiapoi Earthquake Recovery Hub for the minister’s media briefing. But they were turned away; the meeting was not open to the public. Even members of the Kaiapoi Community Board, briefed along with the Waimakariri council earlier that morning, were told they had to wait until the media briefing to learn that 860 homes – 20% of the town, plus 80 in the nearby village of Pines Beach – would be red-zoned. For Rolleston, being excluded from the stage-managed media event added insult to a year of injury. 'A few of us who were there concluded that obviously Gerry didn’t want to be confronted by the public.' Along with many red-zoners from the eastern suburbs of Christchurch, he and Belworthy fear their enforced move will involve a serious financial setback because of the gulf between their rateable value – the basis of the Government pay-out package – and those of new subdivisions or existing homes in the few areas where insurers are willing to write new policies. Having been forced to wait for so long, 'we’re really behind the eight-ball when it comes to the land grab', says Rolleston.

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Most sections around Kaiapoi have been snapped up, which means looking further afield and facing the prospect that their children’s schooling will be disrupted. Adding to the pressure, the owner of their green-zoned rental wants to sell, so they have no idea how long they can stay where they are. Like most of their friends, there have been times over the past year when they have had to send children away to stay with relatives because they were not coping. And with another baby due in October, family members in the North Island ask them why they stay. But they are tied by community links, Rolleston’s business and commitment to shared parenting with their former spouses. One year on, he says, 'we are back to square one'. We were warned: Details of how Canterbury would be extremely vulnerable in an earthquake were published 20 years ago – then quietly ignored Twenty years ago, a group of geotechnical experts published a 120-page report analysing Christchurch’s seismic hazard, and the likely impact that the soft soils under the city would have on the intensity of shaking in an earthquake. The lead author was Don Elder, now chief executive of Solid Energy but at that time manager of Soils & Foundations, a division of engineering firm Royds Garden. Elder says the study was launched in the late 1980s against a background of increased understanding of liquefaction and growing interest in the impact of smaller faults. There were tensions among seismic experts at the time, with some challenging the prevailing view that Christchurch had a relatively modest earthquake risk. EQC funded the study as part of a push to upgrade New Zealand’s seismic knowledge. Elder’s group – which included

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leading University of Canterbury researchers – concluded the city’s seismic hazard was comparable to Wellington’s for medium-intensity shaking, but lower than Wellington’s for very large catastrophic events. The group said not only did the area have the potential for rare but very large earthquakes along the Alpine Fault, but more frequent 'moderate to large' earthquakes (magnitude 6 to 7.5) could be expected in the Canterbury foothills and North Canterbury, and less frequent moderate earthquakes under the plains and city itself. Modelling showed the damage to the city from all three types of events was likely to be similar. It was noted that of the four serious quakes in the city’s early history, three occurred in the foothills, and one virtually beneath the city at New Brighton. Further, the researchers concluded the soft, deep soils under the city would have the effect of amplifying earthquake shaking. Compared with the effect on bedrock, there could be a two-step increase in intensity as measured on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale (which measures the effect of earthquakes on land and structures). Says Elder: 'The report basically said Christchurch has a really significant earthquake-shaking risk, partly as a result of the fact we think there is a lot more seismicity – hidden faults – around the Canterbury, Banks Peninsula and Christchurch region than anyone was thinking, and which, even though they are relatively small, are very close. And second, because of the soft soil.' An earthquake of sufficient intensity to cause extensive property damage and loss of life in the city was considered to be a one-in-300-year event.

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The report concluded the greatest concern for Christchurch was liquefaction, with 'a potentially very large part of the eastern city' and sections of the central city vulnerable to the phenomenon. Also, because the soft soils would amplify shaking, mid- to high-rise buildings would be subject to resonant shaking exceeding then-current design methods. Severe damage to water and sewer pipes in the soft alluvial soil was likely, as was rockfall on the hills and landslides if an earthquake hit during the winter. Among the report’s recommendations was building loadings code for the city, detailed the effect of soils on building performance, local seismic design practices. Elder left to just before the report was published in 1991.

a review of the consideration of and a review of work in Canada

'What I heard behind the scenes was that back in 1993 when they reviewed the loadings code, there was a decision made that the predictions in our report were not regarded as particularly reliable or credible, and there were decisions made as part of that process to downgrade the ratings. What or why or how that was done, or exactly who did that, I honestly don’t know too much, other than that I understand the old tensions had continued to apply and in some way played themselves out.'

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Seeing the red zone 4 November 2011 The people are being allowed back into the city from this weekend. Not on foot, or in cars, or on bikes, but on buses. Having been forbidden from entering their own town centre for eight months, they are now permitted to visit it as tourists – for 30 minutes, they may take a seat on a bus that will cruise slowly through the ruins and the vast empty sites that once were places where people worked, lived, shopped and were entertained. They will find the place unrecognisable, disorientating and ugly. For people like me, who either stole inside the cordon in the early days before the military took up guard, and who have subsequently been given the occasional opportunity as a member of the media to tour the red zone, the scale of destruction and pace of demolition has sunk in slowly and gradually. Yet even I, taking perhaps my fifth red zone media tour yesterday as a 'guinea pig' for the CERA-run bus tours that begin on Saturday, still find myself in a state of numb grief. Looking through the window of the bus, and through the lens of the camera, I still have a strange sense of dissociation, as if I am an observer of someone else’s disaster movie. The bus crawled slowly up Armagh St and north into Colombo, past the overgrown gardens of Victoria Square; along the Avon past the condemned PriceWaterhouse 65

Building (the tallest building in town, and whose shareholders are rubbing their hands gleefully at the prospect of a 'value-adding' insurance cheque); along Manchester St, where the art deco curves of the Bob Brown Hifi building still stand amid the graves of other buildings; and past the savagely damaged Octagon restaurant (once the Trinity Congregational Church, designed by Mountfort in 1875), whose dedicated owner is determined to restore the interior. Up Hereford and into Madras St – travelling the wrong way up the one-way system – where flowers laid at the corner of the CTV site have withered and died; past the Horse Bazaar, a beneficiary of public restoration money in the past, but now being eaten from the inside by a yellow digger; down Tuam St and back into Manchester St past the bashed but surprisingly sturdy-looking brick lanes that once housed the best of the city’s eclectic shops and cafes. Back into Colombo St, where we caught a discombobulating glimpse of people shopping in the sun: amidst this disfigured landscape, the little pop-up container mall that opened last weekend is a bright, tiny island of our weird new normal. And then to the Square, if it is still possible to call it that when so many of the buildings that gave it its geometry have gone – the Regent, the Press, Warners. The old chief Post Office stands gloriously intact, yet the rumour about town is that the owner wants it demolished. As for so many others, perhaps, it will be worth more to him as a cashed up pile of rubble than a functional building in a scarred and hollowed-out town. Finally, the Cathedral, which is about to undergo 'partial' demolition to make it safe. Exactly what that means, and how much will be left at the end, Bishop Victoria Matthews can’t

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or won’t say. The church has likewise failed to disclose the nature and extent of the structural damage, although you don’t have to be a chartered engineer to see that it’s in a bad way. In its place, says Bishop Matthews, will be a 'combination of old and new'. It’s a sign of how exhausted we all are, and how blunted our emotions, that the church’s fuzzy statements about the future of what many regard as the city’s most important building has aroused barely a whimper of response. Christchurch, a city that has been the site of vicious and passionate heritage wars in the past – over the museum and the Arts Centre especially – seems to be too tired to fight for ChristChurch Cathedral. Perhaps now that the people are finally to be allowed in to see their brutalised, diminished city, they will decide the time has come to fight for the little that remains.

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Rush to ruin: Christchurch's heritage buildings are a must keep 5 November 2011 Joe and Nicky Arts’s 96-year-old High St building is tantalisingly close to the high fence that marks the edge of Christchurch’s central city 'red zone'. If fate had placed their property a few metres to the south or east, it would be outside the cordon and they might have had it fixed by now and been back at work in their printing and card-making company. Instead, the brother-and-sister team have endured eight months of frustration, during which one corner of their earthquake-strengthened building – one of a row of 16 – was ripped open by the failure of an adjoining, unreinforced building in the 13 June quake. Access to the locked-down red zone has been in fits and starts, with endless frustration caused by what Nicky calls 'truckloads of red tape' and constantly changing rules. On one occasion they were granted access for work on their property and were all set to go, only to be told at the last minute that their project manager, Hawkins Construction, was not accredited by CERA. Only in the past fortnight have they been able to proceed with installing the steelwork that’s needed to protect their building from further damage.

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Meanwhile, their printing press – housed in a fully reinforced 'bunker' at the rear of the building – sits idle, and they have been forced to keep their business ticking over by putting work through other printers’ machines. Despite the immense obstacles, the Arts’s building will survive both the earthquakes and the ravages of the red zone bureaucracy, and there are hopes the brick row to which it belongs – the Duncan’s Buildings – will remain standing as a rare reminder of Christchurch’s heritage. In the near distance, the long yellow arm of a digger punctures a cloud of dust as yet another building is razed. Throughout the city, an army of demolition crews and machines is mulching through hundreds of commercial and public buildings. Some 1200 are expected to be demolished, of which 900 are within the cordoned CBD red zone – roughly half the buildings in the commercial and cultural heart of the city. Well over 600 have already been taken down. Many of those on the demolition list are buildings that few would shed a tear over, but among those lost so far are 140 heritage buildings listed under the Christchurch City Plan, and 72 registered with the Historic Places Trust. Of 40 highly significant buildings listed as 'must keep' by local heritage group Iconic following the February earthquake, half have been bowled and grave fears are held for others, including the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament (built in 1901) and the Canterbury Provincial Government buildings (1858-65). The future of badly damaged ChristChurch Cathedral (1864) hangs in the balance; as the Listener went to press, no decision had yet been made by the

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Anglican Church Property Trust – the legal owner – on whether it will be demolished or repaired. An untold number of non-registered character buildings have also been cleared. Most have come down without a peep of public protest – in part because their demolition has occurred behind the cordon, where the public cannot see; and in part because of a mute acceptance that the clear-felling of 'old dungers' is necessary to speed the rebuilding of the city. That is until Kit Miyamoto came to town and gave voice to the outrage of heritage advocates. An engineer whose firm, Miyamoto International, specialises in disaster recovery, he was one of a prestigious line-up of international experts invited to speak in the city in August. But instead of delivering the usual platitudes about the plucky resilience of Cantabrians and the brave leadership of the recovery effort, he dropped a bombshell. Christchurch, he said, was headed entirely down the wrong track with its strategy of demolishing half the central city. Buildings that could be economically repaired and strengthened were being destroyed, and priceless heritage was being wiped out. Instead of creating a blank canvas upon which the city would quickly recreate itself, the demolition crews would leave behind a bleak landscape of empty lots that could take up to 50 years to be rebuilt. 'In a modern society like this, the taking-down ratio should not exceed 10% or 20% maximum,' he said. What he was seeing in Christchurch was simply 'unbelievable'.

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Miyamoto International engineer Michael King, a Californian now based in the city, claims many of the buildings being torn down could be fixed for 20-30% of the cost of a new building – and in a 'fraction' of the time. It’s far better, he argues, to rehabilitate existing buildings than to continue with an 'absolutely frightening' rate of demolition – only to find that when the cordon comes down next April the city has been reduced to a dust bowl where tenants won’t want to go and where developers won’t want to invest. King says cost-effective engineering solutions exist for damaged heritage buildings – cracked masonry walls can be taken down, strengthened and replaced; foundations can be retro-fitted; steel rods can be added for ductility. He cites the case of one building he saw recently, with loose parapets, a lintel where the bricks have bowed out and a cracked wall, which has been slated for demolition. Yet it could be fixed in a matter of weeks, he argues. But if it is as easy as King says to save these buildings, why isn’t it happening? The answer seems to lie in a complex combination of insurance, CERA’s sweeping powers, tighter building requirements and the demographic make-up of Christchurch commercial building owners. In California or Japan, where a building might have only 15% earthquake insurance cover, owners will stand in front of the bulldozers to protect their property, observes one local engineer with extensive experience in retro-fitting historic buildings. In contrast, New Zealand property owners have had access to cheap and abundant insurance that – combined with

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slack regulation of earthquake-prone buildings – has encouraged them to do nothing to strengthen their buildings. For Christchurch owners faced with the option of repairing damaged buildings or getting an insurance pay-out, there’s a powerful incentive to go for the cash. 'We have owners desperate for us to say the building has less than 33% of new code strength, and is therefore classed as a ‘dangerous building’. Then they go along to CERA and have an exchange of letters. The owners hand over the letter from the engineer saying it’s under 33%, and CERA hands them a letter saying, ‘Tell us how you’re going to knock it down within 10 days,’' says the source, who asked not to be named because of his involvement with a raft of clients with damaged buildings. Conversely, an owner with an old building that is not assessed as dangerous is effectively disadvantaged – commercial building insurance policies generally don’t pay for repairs up to 100% of code, and there is a perception that tenants won’t want to return to old buildings. At the same time, building code requirements have been substantially increased, adding significantly to the cost of repair. In addition, in the hostile post-quake insurance environment, the cost of cover on pre-1935 buildings – if it can be obtained at all – has risen exponentially. Christchurch property developers Dean Marshall and Shaun Stockman owned 20 heritage buildings in the High St area, of which 16 have been demolished. One that remains standing was strengthened to 100% of code in 2007 and has come through the earthquakes virtually unscathed – yet the cost of insuring it has gone from $6000 a year to $60,000, with an excess of $400,000.

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Stockman says the extra cost can’t be passed on to tenants, so the cashflow generated by the building will fall by $54,000, which is equivalent to a $700,000 loss in capital value. Even for buildings of great historical significance, there is little standing in the way of demolition. The 1881 Guthrey Building in Cashel St – category I on the Historic Places Trust register – was demolished despite intense efforts by heritage architects and engineers to save the facade, and the promise of $500,000 from the Canterbury Earthquake Heritage Building Fund. But owner Peter Guthrey says the project would have cost $1.3 million, with no guarantee of further funding or that the finished building could be insured. In the end he felt the public funds were better directed at the prestigious Arts Centre (estimated to have suffered $240 million in damage). Similarly, the 1903 Horse Bazaar in Lichfield St – registered by the Historic Places Trust as a category II building – is coming down, despite the investment of $250,000 of public money in its restoration. Owner Simon Henry says insurance is 40% less than the cost of repair, so it doesn’t make economic sense to save it. But engineer Barry Knowles, who has earthquake-strengthened many old Christchurch buildings, believes poor-quality estimates of repair costs are being drawn up by engineers with little experience on heritage buildings. He agrees with King that many could be saved for substantially less than the price of a new building. 'A lot of [owners] want a new building, so they get very high prices for repairs … And there is a lack of expertise on pricing this sort of work.' He has seen estimates that are five

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to six times higher than what he would consider a realistic cost. In a similar vein, one engineer told the Listener the 1905 Regent Building in Cathedral Square – registered as category I by the Historic Places Trust – could have been saved for a 'minor investment'. Instead, it has been demolished. .

Knowles believes insurers are paying out on the basis of inflated repair estimates because they want to get old buildings off their books. Insurance Council chief executive Chris Ryan says insurers have little choice but to pay if presented with findings from CERA and engineers that a building is unsafe, and owners who want cash settlements. Another driver behind the pace of demolitions is that many of Christchurch’s commercial building owners are elderly, passive investors, whose properties were often poorly tenanted before the earthquake and who don’t have the skills or the stomach for complex restoration projects. An insurance pay-out gives them a way out. Knowles disputes the suggestion CERA has been forcing unwilling owners to demolish. Although the agency recently ordered the demolition of the heritage Highpara Apartments against the owners’ wishes, Knowles says generally CERA has allowed owners with 'realistic' repair plans and sufficient financial backing to go ahead. Nevertheless, the traditional guardians of heritage buildings – the Historic Places Trust and city council heritage staff – have been rendered toothless. Although personnel from both agencies provide advice to CERA on heritage buildings – and in 50% of cases the Historic Places Trust has recommended repair rather than demolition – they have no say over the final decision. Further, CERA has made the demolition of heritage

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buildings a permitted activity under the Christchurch City Plan, which means the normal opportunity to make submissions via the resource-consenting process has been lost. The forces aligned against the restoration of heritage buildings are such that the $4 million Canterbury Earthquake Heritage Building Fund – set up after the September quake – has so far been able to make only five grants, worth a total of $1.6 million. Fund chairwoman Anna Crighton says few applications are being received because the roadblocks in the way of heritage retention are so overwhelming for owners. 'It’s just a nightmare to try and save heritage in Christchurch.' But although the cost of saving old buildings might be considerable, the cost of continuing to bulldoze them into the landfill may be just as great. Bill Johnson, a former Alabama politician who ran that state’s recovery effort after Hurricane Katrina and is now based in Christchurch as head of disaster recovery company Ceres Environmental, fears the demolitions are increasing the risk of capital flight. As buildings come down and owners are cashed out by their insurers, the financial ties that connect them to the city are cut. Instead of giving owners an 'exit ticket' out of town, he says, CERA should be encouraging them to come together in precincts to find out who plans to stay and who wants out, identifying the obstacles to getting their street reopened, and working collaboratively on repairs and redevelopment. 'CERA is looking at streets in terms of demolition, not in terms of ‘what do we need to do to open this street?’' 75

In the area around High St, property owners are working with Johnson and Miyamoto’s King in the hope that by collaborating they can rescue the Victorian and Edwardian buildings that are still standing, and retain the façades of the historically significant 1881 Excelsior Hotel and 1910 McKenzie & Willis building. Delicate negotiations are under way in a bid to convince CERA to remove the barricades around the precinct, so that property owners can get to work preserving what’s left of this small corner of the city’s heritage – and so that business owners like Joe and Nicky Arts can get back to work.

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Postcards from Christchurch one year on 25 February 2012 In Aranui’s Meon St, a solitary worker in a road sweeper is cleaning dried silt out of the gutter, causing it to rise in a cloud and resettle elsewhere on the street, or drift through the open windows of nearby homes. It seems a futile, go-nowhere endeavour. In this quarter of the city at least, it’s a reasonable motif for the state of Christchurch’s recovery one year on from the deadly 22 February earthquake. Here, and everywhere else in the east and south, the roads remain in Third World condition. Workers in high visibility vests labour in little clusters to fill cracks and potholes, but it’s mostly patch-up work that lasts a few weeks until the weather and traffic cause fresh ruptures. In my days of travelling around the most savagely affected areas – suburbs like New Brighton, Avondale, Dallington, Wainoni, Redcliffs and Sumner (not to mention my own badly battered street in St Martins, close to the 22 February epicentre) – I do not see a house that is undamaged, yet nor do I see a single builder at work. Everyone is waiting in their colour-coded corners for the rebuild to begin. Some red-zoners have been able to take their pay-out and move on, but many others are locked in rounds of

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insurance assessments and a desperate search for affordable land. The orange- and white-zoners – 2753 households – are still waiting to be told whether their land is fit to rebuild on. The blue-zoners were told last June that they were green and therefore good to go, and then told four months later that because their land is prone to liquefaction they were now members of a new 'Technical Category 3' – a classification of do-your-head-in complexity that Christchurch East MP Lianne Dalziel calls 'a new limbo'. Then there are the yellow-zoners, who are one notch down from the blue-zoners on the complexity gradient. And there are people, like my family, finally released from the white zone to green late last year, but with no idea when their insurers will honour their obligations to fix the severely damaged homes. The insurance companies claim they are revving up the rebuild effort, but they’re going about it in a manner to suit themselves, not their policyholders. The upshot is that the areas that have suffered the most extreme damage and the greatest need will wind up waiting longest. A house with a broken patio and cracked plasterboard in wealthy Avonhead (on the city’s lightly damaged west) will be fixed long before – possibly years before – an uninhabitable house on blue-zoned land in Aranui. From the insurers’ point of view, it’s an entirely rational approach – they want to invest in properties on the least vulnerable land, furthest from the ongoing shakes – but it’s a grossly inequitable one.

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Behind all this is a financial time bomb for thousands of displaced householders, whose insurance cover for alternative accommodation is running out. Under most policies, insurers will pay rent only for a year or so. But repairing all the broken houses could take four to five years, the insurers say. They are delegating the cost of the delay to the Government – which will pay a subsidy of up to $330 a week to those who have used up their insurance provision – and to homeowners, who in most cases will have to top up the subsidy to meet the rising cost of rent, as well as pay the mortgage on their damaged homes. Is it any wonder that people are angry? Rachael Fonatia, the dynamic but exhausted manager of the Aranui Community Trust, probably speaks for everyone on this side of town: 'At what point is enough enough?' she asks. 'Where’s the plan?' The hopeless, hapless Christchurch City Council and its reviled leaders, chief executive Tony Marryatt and Mayor Bob Parker, are only partly to blame for the paralysis but are taking all of the heat. The main reason nothing is happening is that the insurers want a risk-free rebuild. It is they – more than the city council, the CERA or the Government – who rule our lives. Of course, people have left. The question is whether the trickle – the official estimate is that the population has fallen by only 8900 – will turn into a flood as people get worn out from waiting, spooked by the post-23 December realisation that the ground beneath our feet still can’t be trusted, and anxiety about their jobs. Employment in Canterbury has fallen more than 27,200 since before the September 2010 quake. The longer people wait for substantive signs of recovery, the more their bonds with the city and their

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neighbourhoods weaken and the easier it becomes to cash up and flee. People from outside ask if 'they' will rebuild the shattered inner city with fabulous modern architecture. I hope so – the opportunity for a brilliant new sustainable urban heart is before us. But 'they' are mostly private investors who face gargantuan obstacles, including a hostile insurance and financing environment, nervous tenants and a stupefying lack of direction from above. (Just one example: the Government claims to support the rebuild of the CBD, yet permits Inland Revenue and the Ministry of Social Development – two of the biggest inner-city employers before the quake – to sign up for nine-year leases on the far western outskirts.) And yet, despite the background thrum of anger and grief and loss, there is something remarkable about the civility and decency with which people are going about this disaster. Recently I sat in on a community meeting in the blue-zoned suburb of Brookhaven – one of dozens of similar gatherings held in hard-hit suburbs over the past 16 months – where more than 500 people crammed into a local church. With their lives and community in limbo, they sat for two hours through complex explanations from insurers, EQC, CERA and the city council about what their land zoning meant. The room was full of stress and worry – everyone wants to know how long it will be before they can move on – but they kept their rage in check, waited their turn to ask questions and were attentive as the earthquake officials gave what appeared to be honest answers. All over the city, people are coming together to talk and act – in neighbourhood groups, art groups, music groups, groups that beautify the rubble, groups that minister to the

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vulnerable, groups that are protesting for better performance from the city council. In the teeth of adversity and destruction, it is this process of community discourse that is holding us together. One year on, Christchurch is on a tortuously slow, rutted and uncertain path to recovery. It is a place of one-step-forward, one-step-sideways frustration, of heroic compassion and creativity, of disappointment and despair, of struggle and determination. Here are some of our stories. Red-zoners Jenny and Allan Faulkner, Regan and John Helsloot If Christchurch has a Ground Zero, it is perhaps Waitaki St, Bexley. In the days and weeks after 22 February, the street was a swamp of fetid water, silt lay in great drifts against houses and fences, homes sat slumped and broken on the ruined ground. A year on, it remains a scene of utter desolation. Unmown lawns grow up around the windows of abandoned homes, and whirlwinds of dried silt are kicked up in the breeze. The roads and footpaths are smashed. Peering through the windows of some houses we see broken crockery, upended furniture, and food thrown from cupboards and fridges lying as it fell a year ago. Save for former resident Gary Judd, who is doing a letter-box drop for Project Exodus – a programme run by his church offering to help people relocate their possessions out of the red zone – the street is completely deserted. Waitaki St has been Allan and Jenny Faulkner’s home for 30 years. They left their leaning and broken house immediately after the February quake, and in June last year the area was red-zoned. With the house a write-off, they’re entitled to a 81

rebuild under their insurance policy, so they have opted to take 'option two' under the Government’s red-zone offer – a $96,000 pay-out (the 2007 rateable value) on their 840sq m section, and a replacement home built by their insurer, AMI. But their land pay-out isn’t enough to buy a new section anywhere in Christchurch. As retirees, they can’t – and don’t want to – take on a mortgage to pay the price demanded by land developers. And so they have decided, reluctantly, to leave. They have a daughter in Tauranga who has found a section for $100,000, and they will rebuild there. 'At least it will allow us to regain our equity. Otherwise, we just couldn’t find a way forward,' says Jenny. 'It means leaving my elderly parents and two other children in Christchurch. We are not leaving out of choice.' Until now, their insurance policy has covered the cost of renting alternative accommodation, but like thousands of other displaced homeowners around the city, that provision runs out soon and they will have to find the $335 weekly rent from their own reserves, or live with family until they have a home to move into. Because they are leaving the city, they don’t qualify for the Government’s temporary accommodation subsidy for homeowners displaced by earthquake damage. 'It’s been really tough. You feel pulled every which way,' says Jenny. She no longer feels grief for the loss of her home, but moving away from friends and community will be painful. One of those she will leave behind is her best friend and near-neighbour Regan Helsloot, who lives just around the bend in Bexley Rd. Regan, husband John and their two younger children are losing their two-and-a-half-year-old home under the red-zone package. When we knock on their

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door one dusty afternoon in late January, despair is written across Regan’s face. The family have continued living in the house since the earthquakes – indeed, compared with many around this city, the interior is in pristine condition. But they have endured three rounds of liquefaction and the house has been declared a write-off by their insurer. But like the Faulkners, their red-zone land pay-out – $73,000 – doesn’t come close to the price of good land elsewhere in Christchurch. Regan, a part-time cleaner who lost a large chunk of her income when her central-city employer shut down, and John, a truck driver, can’t see a way out of their bind, short of taking on a massive extra mortgage. Adding to the stress, their insurer, State, has told them the value of their rebuild will be only $1000 per square metre. 'You can’t build a house for that,' says Regan. 'Our lawyer says the average price is $1500.' They had been hoping for an affordable land-and-home package in a new subdivision on good land on the northeast fringe of the city, but a few days ago were told that project had stalled. Meanwhile, the May deadline for deciding which buy-out offer to accept is looming. Regan’s eyes flood repeatedly with tears as we talk; she says she spent much of the previous night vomiting because of the stress. Aside from the prospect of a serious financial setback, it is simply depressing living in a derelict, dust-blown and abandoned street. Empty houses around them have been looted, and they worry about the security of their own home. In the absence of a functioning sewerage system, their waste is diverted into a tank on their property, which council workers suck out every day. It often smells, and if the

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workers are late it overflows. The silt is wreaking havoc on their cars – one set of brake linings has already been wrecked. Despite everything, the Helsloots don’t want to leave Christchurch. Their children are here, and youngest son Daniel is still at high school. 'This is home,' says Regan. Community builder Marnie Kent 'Do you know what?' says Marnie Kent, as if about to make an astonishing revelation. 'I’m looking forward to the future of Christchurch. We can, as a community, help shape our city. We just have to have patience and perseverance and I believe we will get through this together.' Kent has enough optimism and energy to make up for those who find theirs flagging under the size and complexity of the city’s crisis. Ever since the quake, she has been a whirlwind of community-building action in her badly damaged suburb of Sumner. For four weeks she ran a community information hub from the old Sumner School hall (having escaped her damaged home to live in a tent for five weeks with her mother and seven-year-old daughter, Amelia). Then she started a tent school for kids whose schools were closed, which operated three days a week for three weeks. Later, she called a public meeting that spawned a plethora of local action groups focused on disaster response, greening local demolition sites, art, urban design and community gardening. She was a driver behind the group that developed a concept plan for the rebuild of Sumner Village. As the co-ordinator of the Sumner Community Group, she is working with Neighbourhood Support to set up a network of street co-ordinators whose job is to find out who is in their street, what their needs are and who has what skills. 84

'So, if we are [cut off], we can access that database of skills and find what’s needed. After the earthquake, I thought Civil Defence were going to come here and help, but they were nowhere to be seen … What I have realised is that we, the residents, are civil defence.' Kent – Australian-born, but with strong family links to Christchurch and Banks Peninsula – has never considered leaving. 'I feel grounded here … And Christchurch needs us.' Business owner Ange Leonard The fish inside Ange and Paul Leonard’s inner-city shop, City Seafoods, turned to toxic slime months ago, and the business they built up over seven years remains in a state of suspension a year after they fled. Just before Christmas someone from the city council rang to tell them to clean the place up. Ange says they had tried to get access to the shop in the weeks after the earthquake, but apart from one short visit, they weren’t allowed through the cordon. On the day of the earthquake she got her customers and staff safely out of the shop. Paul raced back from a delivery, and tried – in vain – to save a man crushed in his car by a falling façade. They managed to find new jobs for their workers, drew on their business-interruption insurance to pay their creditors and battled through their contents claim (still unpaid). 'People keep asking us when we will re-open, but it’s not that easy,' says Ange. Before the quake they had a great location, earning 70% of their revenue from big hotels in the vicinity and 30% from downtown office workers. Now the hotels are mostly gone and the city is a wasteland of demolition sites and dusty, vacant plots. They still don’t know if the building 85

they rented is viable. 'If we did reopen, there’s a 50-50 chance we could go belly up.' Every day Ange searches for alternative properties, but re-establishing in a new location would require a $500,000 investment in chillers and drainage systems. And there is great uncertainty about everything. What will be the outcome of the optimistic plan to guide the rebuild of the central city? Will they be able to get insurance? What will happen to rents? 'It’s a big risk to go back into it.' Her sister in Nelson urges them to leave, but it’s not straightforward. Aside from the business, there’s the investment in their home which, while liveable, has suffered structural damage and they don’t know when it will be rebuilt or repaired. 'We’ve looked at whether we should up and leave, but this is our home. Our family is here.' Optimistically, she says Christchurch should have a 'fantastic' future. The question is: how long will it take? 'You have to think the city will come back bigger and better, but it won’t be in two or three years, it will be in excess of five or 10 years.' Artistic director Ross Gumbley The Court Theatre’s Ross Gumbley was on the third floor of the Arts Centre when the shaking began at 12.51pm on 22 February. He thought the floor was about to give way beneath his feet, that stone would come crashing down on his head. When he discovered the building was still standing and that he was alive, he finished composing a difficult email he’d been sweating over all morning.

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Moments later, standing outside the Gothic Revival precinct, he realised that the Court – which had been based in the Arts Centre for 40 years – would not be going back. He made his way home through the chaotic streets, hunkered down and fell into five days of gloom. He would meet with Court chief executive Philip Aldridge and discuss survival strategies for the theatre, but they would just wind up feeling glum in each other’s company, recalls Gumbley. 'Normally, we’re both annoyingly optimistic. It was totally uncharacteristic.' Then, on day six, the mood changed. 'We thought, screw this, let’s go. Then we found this place and it was foot to the floor.' 'This place' is the old grain warehouse in the backstreets of Addington that they transformed in nine months into a temporary new home for the Court, opening their first post-quake show just before Christmas. Under the vast roof of the 2800sq m warehouse they have built an auditorium and a labyrinth of portable wardrobe and administration offices, installed a couple of shipping containers to serve as a box office and bar, and set up a workshop. As 70% of the theatre’s income is earned through the box office, Gumbley says the survival of the Court depended on continuity. And he knew if it was forced into abeyance for an extended period, it would bleed vital costume and set-building skills that have been handed down through generations. 'In that sense we were almost like an island of knowledge that was at risk of sinking without trace, and if we had to start up from scratch again it would be incredibly hard.' As it was, they faced a Herculean task. With 40 years of costumes cordoned off inside the Arts Centre (including an astonishing $10,000 worth of buttons), replacements had to be begged and borrowed. To fund the project, $4.6 million had

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to be raised. The first show – Roger Hall’s A Shortcut to Happiness – had to be rehearsed. In the middle of it all, Gumbley’s wife, Georgia, gave birth to their first child six weeks before opening night. Although he is filled with relief to have the theatre open again, and grateful for the support it has received, Gumbley says the 23 December aftershocks have forced him to confront a difficult truth: 'There’s a feeling that ‘there’s no doubt about this, we’re in a sequence, and how is that going to play out?’ It’s the first time really that I’ve asked myself, ‘Is this really where I want to be bringing up a young family?’ I haven’t answered that question yet. I feel safe where we are living, and I don’t think there is any immediate danger to my new family.' 'And I feel a commitment to this theatre. The re-establishment of the Court has been really important. It shows organisations can get back up and running, not just at a make-do level but at a meaningful level. It gives us a little bit of our lives back. And it’s so important for people to be able to come together as a community, and that’s what this theatre can offer.' He remains an optimist, but sees about him a city in 'stasis', where everyone is waiting for everyone else to go first, and where optimism is being drained away by insurance hassles. 'Where is the optimism going to come from in the future? How do we get out of this trough of inertia?' Heritage owner and entrepreneur Alan Slade After four near misses, energetic, driven entrepreneur Alan Slade has been forced to re-evaluate what he calls his 'amazing optimism'. Slade, wife Lorraine and their jazz-singer

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daughter Natalie own the former Trinity Congregational Church on the corner of Worcester and Manchester streets. Built between 1873 and 1875, it was Canterbury’s first Benjamin Mountfort-designed stone church. The Slades bought it in 1993. At the time they had a thriving Australian-based Japanese weddings business, and the magnificent Gothic Revival church was their most prized venue. In 2004 they moved to Christchurch and turned it into Octagon Live, a successful cabaret and restaurant. The building took a hammering in the first earthquake on 4 September, 2010, but was considered repairable. Luckily, the quake occurred at 4.35am and no one was inside. Octagon Live was open for business within a few weeks. When the 2010 Boxing Day aftershock hit the city centre, the building got smacked around again. By sheer luck, the business was closed that day. The Slades managed to get it open again by New Year. On 22 February, six people were in the building, including three chefs who were in the kitchen under the tower preparing for a cocktail party. The tower collapsed, but everyone walked out uninjured. Again, sheer luck. Slade’s commitment to rescue the building didn’t flag. With the city centre sealed off by the red-zone barricades, his efforts to stabilise the structure and work on a repair plan earned the support of CERA and the Christchurch City Council heritage team. He accepted that the failed tower could never be rebuilt, but was determined to restore the glorious timber interior and the bulk of the stone exterior. In a city that has suffered comprehensive destruction of its heritage, it was to be a rare and precious link with the past.

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On 23 December it was walloped again. Slade’s workers had knocked off for the Christmas break the day before. The wall they had been working on collapsed in the magnitude 5.8 and 6 aftershocks. 'I’m starting to run out of sheer luck,' says Slade. 'How far do you push this thing? This is an angry Mother Earth.' Will they go on with the rescue mission? Natalie – who has written and recorded a breezy, uplifting song called Build It for the Children – has helped sustain her parents’ motivation for the project. But aside from the thrashing earth, there are other obstacles: insurance is scarce and expensive, and they face a punishing excess of 20% of the building’s value; the consenting process is 'onerous and long and costly'; and Slade thinks the well-intentioned green requirements in the CBD rebuild plan will only impose cost and do nothing substantive to push the city towards a sustainable future. 'It’s regulation after regulation that reduces our freehold rights.' When we talk in late January, Slade says he feels there’s a 50-50 chance the project will go ahead. He has removed equipment and tools from the site while he and his family think things over. 'We’re the guardians of that wonderful building, and we’ve felt we must do something about it. But if we’re going to risk people’s lives, then the sacrificing of our retirement income isn’t worthwhile.' Kiosk owner Ian Carter Healing and renewal, we are learning, begin with small acts of inspiration and generosity. On Colombo St, Sydenham, Ian Carter’s bright relocatable Coffee Zone kiosk is the focal point for a cluster of nimble, creative enterprises that are

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bringing energy and life back to an area levelled by the quakes. After the February quake, Carter felt he had to do something, so he set about building a cafe entirely from recycled materials. The walls are made from the panels of a chiller that was headed for the dump, and clad with timber planks recovered from demolition sites. He brightened the exterior with a hoard of second-hand Lego, built planter boxes from demolition timber and grew a crop of strawberries (customers can help themselves). Music is piped through speakers he picked up for free at a charity store. And when the landowner of the site on which his cafe sits decides to rebuild, he can pick up his building and open up on another vacant site. Coffee Zone is a joint venture with Greening the Rubble (GTR), a volunteer group that, like its sister organisation Gap Filler, is dedicated to filling raw, empty sites with beauty. GTR installed gabion boxes and topped them with brightly painted recycled timber to serve as seating for coffee drinkers. They brought in a cascade of yellow planters, furnished the back wall with donated timber, and planted native trees down the south boundary. Out the back, they’re creating an outdoor music room, complete with piano. Next door to Coffee Zone, Hitesh Ravji has been running his dairy from a leased container since soon after the February earthquake destroyed his building. Out the front, GTR has created a temporary raised garden and made seats out of old pallets. On the north side of Coffee Zone, a group of Gap Filler volunteers spent a week in January building a 10sq m head office for the group.

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The day we stop for a coffee and a chat, Carter, wife Sandra and their barista, Bex, are doing a steady trade. He says it’s a subsistence business, but building it has sustained his spirits. 'I was heartbroken by the devastation in the city. This has helped me. It has given me a bit of healing.'

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How the Christchurch Pops Choir lit up our neighbourhood 11 June 2012 Beautiful things still happen. Even in a week when winter came early and hard. Even in a city suffering a bone-deep weariness and caught in a paralysing fog of insurance-related bureaucracy. Even in our neighbourhood, still badly bashed up 17 months on from the 22 February quake, with several homes demolished, several more destined to come down, almost all severely damaged, and half still stuck in the white-zone limbo that was imposed almost exactly a year ago. The beautiful thing for us was the Christchurch Pops Choir. This soaring group of voices is the inspiration of the brilliantly talented Luke di Somma, a young Fulbright scholar who has come home to Christchurch after completing a masters in musical theatre writing at New York University. Faced with the loss of performance outlets for singers and musicians after the quake, di Somma conceived of a choir, the likes of which we haven’t seen before – a community of up to 80 singers, doing everything from Michael Jackson to Don McGlashan, Gershwin to Gaga, from Queen to Adele. This weekend neighbourhood.

they

came

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and

sang

for

our

little

A few weeks ago, through the online group we use to keep our street connected, we’d set a date for a pot-luck dinner, something we’ve tried to do periodically to build the community bonds that will help sustain us through the long road ahead. But in this, our second post-quake winter with little sign of progress towards rebuilding, I wanted us to do more than just get together to eat and trade insurance horror stories. We needed something joyful, something brilliant. So I wrote a cheeky email to di Somma, asking if it was beyond the bounds of possibility for the Christchurch Pops Choir to come and sing to our small gathering of 50 or 60 neighbours on a mid-winter night; oh, and by the way, we couldn’t offer them anything more than a modest donation. I expected to be duly ignored or receive a polite 'no thanks'. But, no; choir president Jo Domigan wrote back with the news, 'We’re on!' And on Saturday night, there they were. Fifty or so choristers filed through the door of our local school hall – one of the few neighbourhood venues not closed by earthquake damage or tagged 'unsafe' by nervous engineers – and lifted the roof with a powerful blast of gospel, rock and pop. Their rendition of McGlashan’s divine Bathe in the River brought me to tears; there was Man in the Mirror, Bohemian Rhapsody, Seasons of Love from the musical Rent, and Adele’s Rolling in the Deep – all superbly tight and masterfully executed.

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And, to finish off, the song they performed at the 22 February memorial and which has become an anthem of hope for Christchurch’s tired souls, You Raise Me Up. As moving as the music itself was the generosity and warmth of the performance and of di Somma’s energetic leadership. I got the impression the choir, which was celebrating its first anniversary last night, was getting as much of a boost as we were. From their community to ours, a beautiful collision.

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Outside the square: Can Christchurch be revitalised? 16 June 2012 At the corner of Colombo and Wordsworth streets is a precinct of hope. It’s a small smell-of-an-oily-rag cluster of creativity and commerce that fills the space left scarred and empty after the diggers cleared a row of earthquake-damaged buildings. It faces brightly and optimistically to the street, offering a glimpse of how a better future might look. At one end, there’s the 10sq m relocatable Gap Filler head office, built by volunteers from the Sustainable Habitat Challenge with recycled materials. It rests lightly on the dodgy ground and is powered entirely by the sun. There’s a prototype mini-golf green, a new Gap Filler project that is soon to be unfurled at multiple sites around the city. Writ large on a concrete block wall behind, a line from Wordsworth addresses the city’s lingering grief: The things which I have seen I now can see no more. Greening the Rubble has installed planter boxes and gardens, there’s street furniture made from recovered materials, and wooden pallets reborn as hard surfacing. Alongside is Ian Carter’s relocatable Coffee Zone kiosk, and a couple of ubiquitous shipping containers from which two of the owners of this strip of land run their businesses, one a picture framer and the other a dairy. Over the months, the site has grown and 96

evolved. Bike past one day, and Coffee Zone has shifted 20m to the north; another day a painted piano has appeared, or there’s a new outdoor nook under construction. On another site a couple of blocks up the road is a giant chess set, courtesy of Gap Filler and University of Canterbury students. Further along there’s Wayne Youle’s enormous 37m shadow board painting, I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour, looming over its barren plot. Around the corner, outside the offices of design company F3, architectural graduate Andrew Just talks me through the detailing of the prototype steel-framed relocatable 'box' he and his colleagues have designed as the module for a transitional arts precinct on a vacant site in Madras St. It will provide studio space for a creative community starved of venues since the quakes began. A few blocks further, on a site still locked behind the red zone cordon, is where – it’s hoped – the performance arts will soon be housed in a riot of marquees and domes known collectively as the Arts Circus. A little to the northeast, past where the Anglican church will put its temporary cardboard cathedral, is James Meharry and his radio station, RDU. It’s a converted horse float, parked on the lawn behind a couple of badly damaged villas. Meharry lost his studio at the University of Canterbury in the February quake, so he bought the secondhand float, kitted it out with studio gear, lined it with luscious artificial grass and, with technical help from lots of supportive geeks, got the RDUnit on air last July. As the desertification of the central city continues – a breathtaking 80% of buildings in the CBD are either down or coming down because they are uneconomic to repair – it’s easy to feel defeated by the sheer vastness of the wasteland

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left behind. Although a few – very few – brave property owners are getting started on new buildings, most are holding their breath. Progress towards the rebuild continues to be frustrated by the freeze on new insurance and the reluctance of tenants to pre-commit. Most are also holding out for the new Government-appointed Christchurch Central Development Unit to come up with its blueprint showing where 'anchor' projects like the convention centre and rugby stadium will go, and whether their land might be compulsorily amalgamated or requisitioned for such developments. Even when the detail of the anchor projects are known, they’ll take time to design, approve, fund and build. Heroes of the recovery In this prolonged and uncertain interim, the heroes of the recovery are those without deep pockets or grand blueprints, who are getting on with the low-cost, low-risk transitory projects that make life in Christchurch worth living – not in some strategically planned distant future, but right now. In this 'transitional' city, Gap Filler has led the way from the beginning. Ryan Reynolds, a lecturer in theatre and film studies at the university and chairman of the Gap Filler trust, says the idea of enlivening vacant spaces in the central city pre-dates the September 2010 earthquake, when he and colleagues from Christchurch’s Free Theatre would walk daily from their Hereford St performance space past the multitude of persistently empty shops and ponder on schemes to rejuvenate them. The Free Theatre was touring in Wellington when the 4 September earthquake struck, and watching the images of destruction from a distance was painful but galvanising. 98

Inspired by Wellington’s Kreuzberg summer cafe, which fills a car park at the top of Cuba St, Reynolds, his partner and fellow thespian Coralie Winn, F3’s Just and other friends dug into their own pockets and got to work on the first Gap Filler project on a Colombo St demolition site. Within a few weeks of the quake, they’d created an outdoor cafe, art house cinema and music venue. With no money to pay musicians, they put a call out for bands to come and play. 'We thought, oh, a few might come,' recalls Reynolds. 'But in the two weeks that we ran that site we had 41 bands play.' The project was an unreserved success. Winn, who’d lost her job at the Arts Centre as a result of the September quake, threw herself unpaid and fulltime at Gap Filler, and more projects followed. Then the deadly and far more destructive 22 February quake struck; the couple’s house fell down 'spectacularly' and they wound up camping with friends. They wondered publicly on Facebook whether it was appropriate to carry on with Gap Filler. 'The response was overwhelming,' says Reynolds. 'They [supporters and volunteers] said ‘you have to keep doing it’.' Since then, Gap Filler has become a charitable trust, Winn has become the paid co-ordinator, and many more gaps have been filled. One of the most outrageously successful was the Manchester St Dance-O-Mat – an open-air dance floor and a coin-operated washing machine converted to provide 30 minutes of light and power to an iPod and speakers. Reynolds: 'People said Christchurch people wouldn’t dance in public. Well, Christchurch showed us.' On one freezing Friday night in late May I learnt ceroc, salsa and swing moves among dozens of strangers; suddenly, it didn’t matter that we were surrounded by demolition sites and

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that the central city was gone. Based on the number of $2 coins pushed into the slot over the project’s two-month life, Winn calculates the floor was danced on by 2000 people. Although the dance floor’s now been packed away for winter, she says the Christchurch City Council is keen to re-establish it permanently. 'So we may gift it to the council.' It’s hard to overstate just how powerful and invigorating this is: young, clever creatives with little money but a huge appetite for trial and error are doing urban design on the fly, and proving that small-scale, inventive spaces will draw people out and restore life to a wasteland. And, says Just (who is also a Gap Filler trustee), it’s radical on another level, too. 'It’s turning private space into public space. So a 60-year-old becomes an urban activist by dancing on the Dance-O-Mat.' Winn: 'Ryan and I both speak the language of performance studies, which actually is the same language as urban design and architecture – it’s how people interact with and move through space, and how space performs and how it causes you to perform.' None of this has been easy. Although the projects appear faintly anarchic, they happen only with agreement from landowners, many of whom are hurting badly because the demolition of their buildings means they’ve lost their income. And Gap Filler’s primary competition for vacant land is Wilson Parking, whose signage is spreading like a rash because it provides landowners with cashflow. There’s also public liability insurance, health and safety, and traffic management plans to attend to. But after 18 months, Gap Filler has figured out how to negotiate the barriers and the concept is about to be scaled up. Life in Vacant Spaces (LIVS) is a new programme based on

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Gap Filler and on research carried out by Reynolds and Winn showing how the temporary activation of derelict spaces has been a successful driver of urban renewal internationally. Funded by the Christchurch City Council, LIVS will be an independent brokerage connecting community groups with landowners willing to have their properties used. It will also handle the hassle of insurance and health and safety management. Projects will operate under 30-day rolling leases, enabling the landowner to take back the site at any time for a permanent rebuild or alternative tenant. Reynolds: 'We’re talking about projects that will be paying no rent or a token fee. They’ll be small-scale, maybe a few hundred dollars. They might only last 30 days, they might get kicked out after 30 days, they might fail after 30 days. So what? It means someone has had a chance to take an idea that would otherwise only be an idea, and give it a shot.' 'I’ve heard people say, ‘Why waste money with temporary things, let’s just build the new permanent thing that we need.’ But that’s so presumptuous that we know what’s right and best right now. We don’t.' Much more than boxes The proposal for a 'boxed' quarter for the arts and music scenes on a Madras St site takes the ideas of experimental transitory urban design up a notch. It began when Martin Trusttum of Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology asked F3’s Just if he could figure out a way to turn shipping containers into a temporary precinct for studios and galleries. Immediately after the quake, CPIT urgently found accommodation for around 10 displaced arts organisations, 101

but Trusttum knew if the city was to retain its cultural fabric it was vital to create cheap spaces for artists to work and exhibit in. Just reckoned they could do far better than shipping containers, and he came back with the design for the ArtBox module – a steel-framed, insulated unit with a see through polycarbonate frontage, which can be bolted together and configured in different ways. It’s designed around the standard length of ply and other building materials, and is small enough to be put on the back of a truck and moved without an escort vehicle. The box is bolted on to small concrete footings – a design that enables it to be easily re-levelled if the ground buckles in another quake, or tweaked to fit another site. 'This deals with the uncertainty,' says Just. 'And if it doesn’t work you can withdraw and put it somewhere else at little cost.' And although the boxes are designed for flexible, temporary uses, he says they wanted to do something that was sustainable and lasting. To prove the point, F3 co-owner Pippin Wright-Stow is building his Lyttelton house from the modules. ArtBox will be a precinct made up of 18 boxes assembled into four pavilions. The bulk of the $600,000-odd cost will be met by donated materials from New Zealand Steel, Placemakers Riccarton and other suppliers that, says Trusttum, understand from a business point of view how important the arts are to the city’s recovery. The first pavilion will go up later this month. Christchurch bands desperately need space, too, and so there’s room in the boxed quarter for BeatBox. Jeff Fulton, the key driver of the concept, says the loss of cheap downtown real estate has forced bands into suburban garages

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or – worse – out of the city. BeatBox will be a pavilion of four different-sized boxes providing affordable space to rehearse and mingle. He’s about halfway towards his funding target of around $700,000. 'Contemporary music has always been a hard sell but we’ll get there, I’m pretty sure we will.' ArtBox and BeatBox will be the anchor tenants of a larger boxed precinct that will use up to 200 of the F3 modules to create a multi-level mixed-use precinct with offices, hospitality and retail. This is being driven by private developer Daniel Godden, who sees an immediate opportunity for a funky quarter where office workers and gallery shoppers rub shoulders with musicians and sculptors, creating an economic spillover for nearby businesses and property owners. Of all the proposed transitional projects, the arts community is most impatient to get the Arts Circus going. The vision of a flamboyant village of temporary buildings, marquees and tops, snuggled near the site of the historic Odeon theatre, is being pushed passionately by George Parker, a director of the University of Canterbury’s Te Puna Toi performance research project and also a long-time member of the Free Theatre. Parker says the Arts Circus is modelled on Munich’s Tollwood festival and will provide a home for the city’s displaced cultural festivals, as well as for one-off performances and new events. There’ll also be space for circus arts, theatre, dance, film, comedy, bars and a market. Like ArtBox, it will also be a chance to play around with different configurations – to see what attracts people and feels right, and what doesn’t – from which the developers of permanent buildings can learn.

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'Originally it was all about retaining artists. But this is also about attracting them. If we can do that, Christchurch can become a centre of creativity and innovation,' says Parker. 'Projects like this are about generating confidence and activity.' Think no further than Glasgow or Melbourne for examples of a vibrant and innovative arts sector being at the centre of urban renewal. The cost of the Arts Circus is thought to be around $3 million – a third of the cost of the temporary rugby stadium in Addington, the bulk of which was paid for by the Government and whipped up in three months with no one batting an eyelid. But this is the arts, and so the money is harder to find and the political will is more fickle. The project hasn’t yet secured the right to use the site, and funding decisions are yet to be made. The Christchurch City Council is enthusiastic about Arts Circus and other transitional projects like ArtBox, which it sees as catalysts for economic recovery in adjacent parts of the city, says senior urban renewal planner Michael Fisher. But just how much influence the council will have on any of this remains unclear, given that central government has usurped its responsibility for the CBD recovery plan and put it in the hands of its new Christchurch Central Development Unit. The wheels of bureaucracy are turning slowly, but the likes of Parker, Reynolds, Winn and Just are doing their damnedest to show that these transitional developments could make Christchurch a living lab of creative experimentation that will attract interest from around the world. 'If we’re smart about the transition, we can build on Lonely Planet’s rating of Christchurch as the most exciting city in New Zealand,' says Parker. 'And when we are talking of financing the rebuild, it’s

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essential that sort of international attention is drawn to Christchurch.' In the meantime, small gaps will keep getting filled, and James Meharry will keep the music coming from the RDUnit. Whenever he hosts a live gig or supports an advertiser who has just got back in business, he takes the horse float on the road, drops down the side to form a stage and puts the show to air. Post-quake Christchurch has been all about experimentation for RDU, he says. 'You’re free from constraint, and you can find ways of doing things and creative outcomes that you wouldn’t have found otherwise … We definitely feel as if we are recovering, and helping the recovery.' Bus to happiness: One Christchurch bar owner has battled bureaucracy to find a new way to serve his customers If Johnny Moore had known back in October last year what he came to learn over the subsequent seven months, he’d have headed to Wellington or Auckland rather than staying put in Christchurch and fighting to get his family business back on its feet. Moore’s central city bar, Goodbye Blue Monday, whose shareholders include his father, former mayor Garry Moore, was destroyed in the February quake. (The building the bar was in stood up to the shaking, but the neighbouring building collapsed onto it.) He was unhurt, but had to wait months to regain access to the property through the red zone cordon. When he finally got inside, he found the place 'comprehensively looted': cases of alcohol, computer equipment, tills and cameras were gone. 'It was methodical. Someone needed to have had a ute and trailer

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to get that much stuff out. It wasn’t just a kid who’d jumped the fence at midnight.' He put the experience behind him, drew down on his business interruption insurance and went hunting for a venue to get started again. Eventually, he alighted on a bare section at the corner of Victoria St and Bealey Ave, and came up with the idea of parking an old bus on the site and converting it into a relocatable bar. There’d also be a caravan where his sister Rosie would run a cafe, and a couple of temporary buildings for toilets and kitchen. The wind and dust would be kept out by plastic sheeting attached to scaffolding around the perimeter of the site. The city council’s planners were enthusiastic, as was business support agency Recover Canterbury. Lots of people lent moral and practical support. He started working on the site in October, with ambitions of having the new bar, called Smash Palace, trading by Christmas. Then began a protracted Kafkaesque battle with the Christchurch City Council’s consenting division. Because the bus was judged to be a building, it needed building consent. That meant concrete foundations had to be laid, and the body of the bus tied down. The handrails had to turn down 90 degrees at the end, and the way they connected to the decking around the bus had to be drawn up by an architect. The wheelchair ramps had to be at a gradient of 1:12. A near-enough 1:10 was not good enough. Then it turned out the scaffolding was also classed as a building. Moore mounted futile protests before complying with the consent department’s demands to provide engineering certification – only to be told the council needed to farm out the approvals to a consultant in Auckland. At his cost.

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Then he realised he’d mistakenly positioned one end of the toilet block 900mm too close to the boundary. Since the neighbouring property was a car park, his fire engineer suggested getting the neighbour to sign a letter saying he was happy with things as they were, provided Moore made the block compliant as soon as the neighbour wanted to rebuild. The council found this unsatisfactory. He was told he had to build a fire wall, designed by an architect, signed off by a fire engineer and builder, and inspected by the council. Eventually, after much anger and argument from Moore, the council said that provided the neighbour signed a legal encumbrance agreeing to have the toilet block left as it was, there would be no need for the fire wall. Smash Palace finally started serving beer to patrons in May, and the place is now humming with revellers and eclectic gatherings even on cold winter nights. But Moore believes the whole process cost him an extra $50,000, and it drove him to his wits’ end. 'Personally and mentally it broke me down. I got to the point where I was seethingly angry. I’d go to bed angry and dream hateful dreams towards the council and I’d wake up hateful.' He found himself drinking and smoking too much, losing sleep and chewing his nails. Without more pragmatic interpretation of the rules for temporary outfits like his, quake hit businesses will be driven from the city, he says. 'The Building Act is fine when it’s business as usual. In Christchurch at present it’s not business as usual.' The council’s building operations manager, Ethan Stetson, is unapologetic. Yes, he says, post-quake Christchurch needs creative entrepreneurs like Moore, who are 'the life-blood of

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the city.' But building quality, fire protection and disabled access still matter. 'The city council is trying to be reasonable, and we want to be reasonable, and there are many institutions where we have been able to stretch ourselves in terms of accepting solutions to satisfy the building code. Unfortunately, what Johnny Moore was asking for in terms of the bus, we weren’t able to go there with him because it was not acceptable in terms of the building code.' Stetson says Moore’s experience should be a lesson to others trying to set up temporary premises: get the engineering documentation right first time, and hire a project manager. The whole thing was painful for the council, too, he says. 'Trust me, we made a loss on the whole experience, but we are bound by the Building Act.'

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Frustration and rage: Christchurch homeowners face long wait for rebuild 8 September 2012 Insurance is all about peace of mind. For a modest sum of money, you enter into a contract with an organisation skilled in understanding risk, which agrees to reinstate your asset in the event of loss. When times are good and you have no need to draw down on it, you can rest easy; and when catastrophe strikes, your insurance policy sees you right and gets you back on your feet. In New Zealand, a country carved up by fault lines, pockmarked with volcanoes, and exposed on all sides to tsunami risk, we’re insured to the hilt against an array of catastrophes that could strike at any time. It’s belts and braces stuff: in a natural disaster, the EQC covers the first $100,000 of the loss on a home and private insurers top that up – commonly (at least until the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes) with full replacement cover. 'Insurance is a wonderful product,' says Dean Lester, who spent 25 years as an insurance underwriter and is now working to help hundreds of earthquake-hit Christchurch households make progress on their claims. 'This should be the industry’s finest hour.' But it’s not. What ought to be a key tool of recovery is instead at risk of creating its own secondary disaster. Having come through the quakes, 109

Cantabrians are being consumed by the bureaucratic liquefaction of our two-tier insurance system, and the prospect of years of fighting to get their homes back. For thousands of householders with wrecked and battered homes, trying to wrest any progress out of EQC and their private insurer involves a constant battle to piece together incomplete, fragmentary and often contradictory information. Two years on, recovery has yet to begin for many. The Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery, the insurance bosses and the head of EQC insist there is a symphony of goodwill and collaboration at the top, and that the pace of progress is on the verge of ramping up. But in the cracked living rooms and rented temporary accommodation of displaced families, it continues to look as if nothing much is happening and no one is in charge. Stories of paralysing uncertainty, financial fear and terrible living conditions are so commonplace they are no longer news. The circumstances of the following four families are neither unique nor remarkable in post-quake Christchurch; rather, they’re a small sample of the thousands locked in stasis while the insurers figure out how to deliver on their promise. The Bedggoods The front of Bryony and Dan Bedggood’s Richmond home broke off in September 2010, and in the February earthquake it separated in two other places. They’ve lost the use of the bedrooms, so the parents sleep on the floor of the lounge each night, sharing the room with one child while the other sleeps in what was a home office. They hold the windows together with industrial tape and bog up the cracks in the walls with expansion foam, which gets chewed out regularly by rats that

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come up the creek that runs along their boundary (still contaminated with sewage from the immediate aftermath of the quakes). They are all on antihistamines because of the detritus that comes down from the cracked ceiling. It’s only in the past couple of weeks that their insurer, AA, confirmed the house is a write-off. They have continued living in it because they were told by a loss adjuster that it could be eight years before their house is rebuilt. (AA denies any of its representatives said this, and claims it’s an urban myth.) They are fearful of the financial consequences of moving out, given their insurance policy will support them in rental accommodation only for a year. Although a Government earthquake accommodation subsidy is available, it falls well short of current rental prices and there is no guarantee it will remain in place. Their land is in the cursed technical category 3 (TC3) – meaning it’s prone to liquefaction and lateral spreading in future earthquakes but is deemed able to be built on with appropriate geotechnical investigation and engineered foundations. In the meantime, their insurer won’t do its own geotechnical drilling on the land and move forward on the rebuild because it wants to wait for the results from a wider drilling programme being run by EQC. There seems to be nothing they can do to hasten the process. 'I just want a home for my kids,' says Bryony. The Westerinks Janice and Maarten Westerink, aged 73 and 79, feel they are in a 'void'. Their home, on TC3 land in the suburb of Parklands, is comfortable and liveable, but the floor slab is cracked in places and they don’t know the extent of the structural damage. They last saw someone from EQC in April

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2011, when they were told their damage was worth under $100,000 and EQC’s project management company, Fletcher Building, would be fixing it. They’ve heard nothing since. When Janice rang to ask their insurer to come and look, she was told 'no way', because EQC had assessed the damage as under the $100,000 cap. 'We have been with [AMI] for 50 years. They made us feel like fools,' says Janice. Neither has good health: Janice has atrial fibrillation, which means her heart stops and then races; Maarten had bladder cancer three years ago. They have advised EQC of their health, but to no avail. They had a place booked in a retirement village before the quake, but had to let it go because their property is probably unsellable given the uncertainties over the land and level of damage. They feel stuck, powerless and sometimes depressed. 'I tell our kids this might end up being their problem, because we could be six feet under,' says Janice. The Downies Jim and Janice Downie, aged 76 and 74, are warm and dry in their home, not far from the Westerinks. But their land also suffered serious liquefaction, the house is on a lean and the floor slab is cracked. They, too, await the outcome of geotechnical investigations into their TC3 land, and their insurer, State, won’t tell them anything until that information is available. They have no idea how long that will take, and still don’t know whether the house is repairable or will have to be rebuilt. Janice has developed emphysema – she thinks it may be because of the fine silt deposited through the area as a result of the liquefaction. They try to put the stress and uncertainty out of their minds, but it’s difficult, and Janice no longer sleeps well. 'What’s hardest is the not knowing.'

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The Keays Bill Keay’s home, like many of his neighbours’, was destroyed in the February 2011 quake. He and his family have been renting since. His Port Hills property was zoned green (meaning it’s considered suitable for residential construction) by CERA last December, but there’s been scant progress since. His claim is being handled by Vero, which says it won’t move on the rebuild until EQC has assessed and paid out on damaged retaining walls that must be fixed first. When he asks EQC when that might be, it can’t tell him. He has contemplated taking a cash settlement from the insurer so the family can buy somewhere else and move on, but it can only give a 'ballpark' figure until EQC settles on the retaining walls. He asked EQC and the insurer if his own builder could fix the walls, and was told no – he must wait until EQC has finished scoping them. Vero says it hopes to give people time frames for their rebuild by the end of this month, but Keay has been told by various people involved in handling his claim that it could be years before the family home is rebuilt. Like thousands of others, he rings up once a week to prod for signs of progress. 'We are inching forward, and some things have happened, but nothing that allows us to actually start rebuilding or start a negotiation.' 6000 displaced households In Christchurch, we are at risk of learning to tolerate the intolerable. Roughly 6000 households are still displaced from their damaged or demolished homes. Of the 21,000-plus homes that have sustained more than $100,000 of damage or are irreparable, and are therefore in the hands of the private insurance companies, fewer than 150 have been repaired or rebuilt. That’s less than 1% of the task. Fletcher Building, 113

which is charged with fixing the 100,000 homes that fall within EQC’s jurisdiction, is busier. It has repaired 20,000 homes and promises to have the rest done by the end of 2015. But these properties are, by definition, the least damaged. While Fletchers is busy replastering and painting homes that in many cases have only cosmetic damage, people like the Bedggoods and the Keays, whose homes are destroyed, face years of waiting. And while this mountain of construction work waits to be done, some builders are struggling to keep their employees busy because there isn’t enough work coming through from the insurers, says Canterbury Master Builders vice-president Alastair Miles – although he sees signs that things may be about to pick up. For many families, the stress of dealing with the insurance bureaucracy and the sense of powerlessness is debilitating. Leanne Curtis, of community advocacy group CanCERN, says people are 'dropping left, right and centre. Half the people I know are medicated.' She fears people are becoming too exhausted to fight, and that the elderly in particular are 'sliding into defeat'. Every month, 200 new clients are having counselling under a free post-quake service funded by the Government. Jo-Ann Vivian, national practice manager for Relationships Aotearoa, says most have never been to a counsellor before. Commonly, their struggle is not caused by the earthquakes and aftershocks, but by the ongoing uncertainties surrounding their homes and the inability to move forward. 'Most of us are used to a reasonable degree of control over the decisions that affect our lives, but in this situation it’s beyond our control and potentially going to remain so for several years. That’s a very unusual stress.'

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Some are venting their rage in street protests, others in tense exchanges in public meetings with embattled insurance company middle managers, others in online comment threads or on the letters pages of the Christchurch Press. And a recent survey of 1000 householders by post-quake consumer group InsuranceWatch has left the industry in no doubt that homeowners feel they have been failed. Led by community leader David Stringer, the InsuranceWatch survey has yielded a 'magnitude of misery' scale, in which the performance of the biggest insurance companies, IAG (which owns State, NZI and Lantern and recently took over AMI) and Suncorp (Vero, AA and SIS) were rated by quake-affected householders as 'poor to awful'. Multiple setbacks In reply, insurers point to all the reasons progress has been difficult: the setbacks caused by multiple aftershocks, the need to divvy up the liability between EQC and the private sector, the need to wait for geotechnical information on damaged land and for new foundation guidelines to be drawn up, and the need to keep reinsurers happy so they won’t abandon the New Zealand market. Jimmy Higgins, who heads Vero’s earthquake programme, says given New Zealand’s size, Christchurch is 'the world’s largest and most complex natural disaster'. The pace of progress is 'consistent' with the scale of the damage and in line with recent disasters in Australia, including the Queensland floods and Victorian bushfires. 'In any disaster there is always a long lead time before hammers start swinging,' he says. There’s no doubt the insurance bosses get the message that people are angry, and that their explanations are increasingly

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sounding like excuses. But apparently that’s normal, too, in a post-disaster environment. 'I’m very, very aware of the sentiment,' says IAG chief executive Jacki Johnson. 'That’s not unusual when people have been under such stress and strain and there has been such uncertainty and complexity.' All the big insurers have produced bold lists of figures showing they have hundreds of repairs and rebuilds under way, thousands of claims going through 'pre-construction' paperwork, and cases where the owner has negotiated a cash settlement. Most companies say they are aiming to give people an idea of time frames for action within coming weeks. But trust that the industry can deliver is being leached away by the waiting. And having come though a second post-quake winter with little progress, thousands of badly affected families are starting to realise there may be many more winters yet before they are back in control of their lives. CanCERN’s Curtis: 'I honestly just don’t know yet that we have a fix on how bad this is going to get for people. They say year three [after a disaster] is the worst – I can’t even imagine that.' Overriding problem So, what is going wrong? Why, given that 95% of householders have insurance, are Cantabrians not being helped back onto their feet more quickly? The overriding problem is the system itself: the double-decker regime of EQC and private insurance cover, underpinned by a historically uneasy relationship. Former EQC chief executive David Middleton, who stepped down in early 2010, says the private insurance sector 'always seemed to see EQC as a competitor. It was always rather difficult to make too much headway with them.' Middleton, who now works for 116

risk-management consultancy Kestrel Group, thinks both EQC and private insurers have done a good job in Christchurch considering the scale of the catastrophe is far greater than anyone had planned for. But 'the difficulties we always seemed to have over talking to each other – the EQC and private sector – have come to the fore a bit'. A bit? Former underwriter Dean Lester believes a fundamental problem is a lack of trust between EQC and the insurers. He says it was always understood that in the case of severe property damage worth over EQC’s $100,000 cap, it would simply hand the claim over to the homeowner’s private insurer to sort out. Instead, it took months for a protocol to be set up to allow that to happen, and in the meantime EQC wasted precious time and resources painstakingly assessing and scoping houses that were clearly over the cap – only for those properties to be assessed all over again by the private insurer. This in an organisation that had no experience as a large-scale claims processor and was having to scale up from a 'peacetime' staff of 22 to an eventual peak of 1650. Much of this was foreseen in a 2009 review of EQC’s core planning document, the Catastrophe Response Plan, which pinpointed the lack of collaboration between private insurers and EQC, warned of costly and wasteful double-handling of claims and multiple assessments, and predicted bottlenecks while private insurers waited for EQC settlement decisions. The demarcation line between EQC and the private insurers was made infinitely more complex after the High Court ruled in September last year that after each major aftershock, EQC’s $100,000 cover was reset. This decision – which has saved the private insurers an estimated $1 billion – has led to a convoluted and messy process of sorting out how much

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damage was caused to a property by each event. Some 20,000 homes are still locked in this 'apportionment' process, and it has taken until mid-2012 for EQC and the private insurers to figure out a way to handle it. EQC says it will take another nine months to finish working through those cases. In the meantime, nothing is happening to fix the damaged houses or settle the claims. A 'them and us' attitude David Stringer, who has organised countless community meetings in his badly hit suburb of Brookhaven to enable residents to ask questions of their insurers, agrees a 'them and us' attitude between EQC and the private insurance companies has been a significant blockage to progress. Although EQC has been vilified for its clumsy systems and abysmal communication with householders, Stringer reserves his strongest criticism for the private insurers, most of whom sat and waited for EQC to hand over the files for severely damaged homes rather than getting their own assessment work under way. Further, he says, most of the insurers failed until recently to develop strategies to prioritise their elderly, sick and vulnerable policyholders struggling in damaged homes. Peter Rose, chief executive of Southern Response – the state-owned company that has been formed to handle the earthquake claims of AMI – acknowledges the system has been bogged down by the interface between the private insurance companies and EQC. Both sides of the demarcation line operate to different definitions – EQC’s responsibility is to return the property to 'substantially the same' as before; his company’s policies promise to repair 'as new'. This issue has

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given rise to vast disparities between EQC and private insurance assessments, including cases where EQC deems the house a repair job worth under $100,000 and the private insurer assesses it as a rebuild. The homeowners are the meat in this messy sandwich, which is why CanCERN has been pushing for months for the two sides to 'work out what their relationship is with one another'. Lately, tensions between EQC and the private insurers have erupted into public sniping over the handling of claims on the most difficult land – so-called 'blue-green', or technical category 3 (TC3). Around 28,000 houses fall under this heading, of which 10,000 are rebuilds or require foundation repairs. Most of the private insurers say they don’t yet have enough understanding of TC3 land to start rebuilding; they say they’re waiting for the EQC-led process of area-wide geotechnical drilling to provide the information they need, and they want to find out exactly how EQC is going to compensate for land damage. EQC denies it’s to blame for the delays, points to the fleet of 15 drill rigs it has on the job and says there’s nothing to stop the private insurers getting on and doing their own drilling. All of this is generating a fog of confusion and bewilderment for the affected homeowners – particularly for those like the Bedggoods, who are on the most vulnerable TC3 land and who know they are in for years of waiting. The insurers and EQC insist they are doing all they can, as fast as they can. Dean Lester doubts it. 'Insurance is a worldwide industry with experts from around the world. Why are these resources not being brought into Christchurch?'

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Taking a lead Leanne Curtis says it’s time for the powerful CERA to take the lead. 'As far as I am concerned, CERA needs to say to [the insurers], ‘You have less than a month to deliver your green zone rebuild/repair plan, you need to say where you will be working, how you will communicate it and to what time frames, what choices people have, where there will be hold-ups and what you’re going to do about it.’' But Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee says he can’t make such demands, and the impression that CERA has wartime powers is quite wrong. 'We have a limited range of tools to sort these things … I don’t have the capacity to direct different behaviour to what we have now. I can encourage it; we can do everything possible from our end to eradicate or solve some of the problems and get agreement on those, and we have been constantly doing that. But we don’t have a magic wand to fix it.' Well, no one asked for a magic wand. But people are asking for a coherent and well-led route out of this disaster. And there is a hint the insurers, whose decisions and processes control tens of thousands of lives, are coming to realise the patience and endurance of homeowners have worn to a shred. 'The time is being probably reached where we have to find a way as leaders of insurance and Government and the primary organisations in Christchurch – who do come together – and say ‘enough is enough’,' says Ron Burke, Vero’s head of communications. 'You tend to reach that point in every major disaster I have been involved in, and when you do it is the start of the real step forward in terms of progress.' It’s time, he says, 'to perhaps be less prone to give excuses as to why we’re not making progress, and more prone to demonstrate where we are and how we are getting on with it.' 120

Policy neglect: As a result of Christchurch’s disaster, the Earthquake Commission’s pay-out scheme will soon get a long-overdue overhaul By the time of the September 2010 earthquake, the EQC had fallen victim to policy neglect. The maximum levels of EQC cover ($100,000 for a home and $20,000 for contents) were set in 1993 and hadn’t been adjusted. The maximum premium of $67.50 had also been untouched for 17 years. In 2008, EQC advised John Key’s incoming Government that neither the caps nor the premium were adequate, given years of property price inflation. It recommended a review of the scheme, and said the maximum pay-out on a single property should rise to $200,000. That advice was ignored – former EQC boss David Middleton says they didn’t even get the chance to discuss it with the minister. As a result of Christchurch’s disaster, the scheme – which has its origins in the Earthquake and War Damage Commission, set up in 1945 – will soon get its long-overdue overhaul. The Government has already trebled the annual premium to start rebuilding the depleted Natural Disaster Fund, and a more wide-ranging review will get under way by the fourth quarter of 2012, says Gerry Brownlee, the minister in charge of EQC. One near certainty is that EQC’s coverage of the first $20,000 of contents will be ditched. 'I don’t think anyone would think that’s a good use of their time and resources,' says Brownlee. More complex is EQC’s coverage of land. New Zealand is unique in insuring land (provided it has a house on it), and Brownlee points out it has been the basis for the key land-zoning decisions in Christchurch, including the red-zoning of the most severely damaged areas. Without it,

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there would have been a 'disastrous situation where people were site-by-site having to prove the viability of their building projects'. A premium for land insurance has never been charged, yet this has turned out to be one of the more costly aspects of the Christchurch disaster. In its 2011 post-election briefing, EQC recommended that land coverage be reviewed, pointing to the lack of alignment between those that make key decisions on land use (local government) and those that bear the costs of risky land use decisions (EQC). The briefing also floated the idea of differential pricing of risk, so that homeowners would have greater incentive to reduce their exposure to natural disasters by choosing more resilient building styles and avoiding high-risk areas. A major area of discussion will revolve around how EQC and the private insurers should share the risk on private homes, given the confusion and duplication that has arisen in Christchurch over the assessment of homes with more than $100,000 of damage. Among the options are removing the cap so that EQC takes all the premium and all the risk on natural disasters; or inverting the current system so the private insurers take on the first layer of losses, leaving EQC to deal with only the most severely damaged properties over a certain cap.

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Cranmer Courts: Christchurch heritage reduced to mulch 4 October 2012 For a brief 10 minutes or so Justin Leadbetter managed to do what advocacy, placards and endless public meetings have failed to do in Christchurch. He stood – sat, actually – between the claws of a large orange excavator and the magnificent 136-year-old Cranmer Courts building, and stopped the destruction. It was a short, polite act of defiance by an architect angry enough about the mincing of the city’s heritage and the squandering of crafted building materials to risk arrest. The police were quickly there, ushering him off the pile of rubble on which he’d perched himself, and sent him off with a warning. The sad fact is that for those who grieve for Christchurch’s diminishing architectural treasures, direct action may be the only option left. A couple of hundreds of metres away from where the Jurgens excavator was making history of the Cranmer Courts, the High Court was hearing a desperate last-ditch case brought by former MPs Jim Anderton and Philip Burdon, who have discovered an obscure piece of legislation that just might save the ChristChurch Cathedral

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from the wrecking ball. We will know in a few weeks if they have been successful. In the case of Cranmer Courts – an imposing Gothic Revival building built in 1876 to house Christchurch Normal School, and redeveloped as apartments in the 1980s – a small but distressed group of protesters assembled early on Thursday morning after hearing word the evening before that demolition was starting at 9am. But the cries of 'shame' and 'cultural vandalism' that went up as the engine cranked into life were futile, and everyone knew it. There was, mostly, just a sense of tired disbelief that no-one had been able to mount a successful defence for a building that has dominated its corner of the city and shaped the urban landscape for more than 13 decades – a building listed as category 1 on the Historic Places register, equal in importance to Parliament Buildings and the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Serious effort was made to save Cranmer Courts, but the odds were stacked against it. Yes, 10,000 earthquakes had left the building with extensive damage. But the owners had carefully and diligently boarded it up to protect it from the weather, and fenced it off from its busy Montreal-Kilmore St corner so that it posed no danger to passing cars and cyclists. Nevertheless, the CERA several months ago slapped on a Section 38 notice – make it safe, or demolish it – and the owners didn’t have the means to come up with a plan that would satisfy CERA. Section 38 notices suspend all the normal protections for listed heritage buildings – demolition can proceed without the requirement for resource consents or public consultation.

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The demolition crews were already at work a month ago when a conditional offer came through from an Australian buyer who wanted to save the historical façade and redevelop the site. CERA agreed to put a hold on the demolition while the owners negotiated a deal (mind you, it also charged them thousands of dollars a day for the cost of suspending the demolition contract). But in the end the potential buyer couldn’t make it stack up. The key stumbling block was CERA’s Section 38 order, which hangs like a sword of Damocles over any potential deal. The risk for the buyer was that he could buy the property, spend large sums coming up with a make-safe plan, and still not satisfy the all-powerful CERA. The deal fell over last Friday. CERA was informed on Monday. And by 9am Thursday the place was beginning to be reduced to a pile of mulch. Could anything more have been done? The owners – 31 apartment owners, tied together as a body corporate – have received their insurance pay-out on the building but they need to be able to sell the land to move on. Many of them are elderly, are displaced from their homes, and don’t have deep enough pockets to rescue the building. CERA, as one person close to the negotiations over the building told me, is not entirely to blame – but nor did it help. Its powers are sweeping and, from the moment the Section 38 was issued, any opportunity for heritage advocates to be heard was lost. And, despite having duly drafted up a heritage recovery programme for the city, as an organisation it is – at best – agnostic about the city’s historic fabric. Gerry

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Brownlee set the tone early on – remember the order to get the 'old dungers' down? According to heritage advocate Lorraine North, over 50% of Christchurch’s listed heritage buildings in the central city have already been demolished; in many cases the demolition has been facilitated by CERA’s Section 38 notices. And it will keep on happening. Ian Lochhead, an expert in the Gothic Revival architecture for which Christchurch used to be famous, told me this morning while we waited for the excavator to land the first, inevitable blow on Cranmer Courts, that 'some of the 20th century’s most brutal regimes did more to save their country’s heritage than CERA and the National Government have done in Christchurch. Stalin did more in Soviet Russia to recover heritage after the second world war than we are seeing here.' If CERA followed its own statements on heritage, 'this would not be happening. But those statements are completely hollow. This is demonstrating just how hollow.'

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About the Author Rebecca Macfie is an experienced journalist who joined the Listener in 2007 as the magazine’s South Island writer. Since starting out in journalism in 1988 she has written for the Christchurch Star, The Press, National Business Review, Independent Business Weekly, North & South, Unlimited magazine and the New Zealand Herald. She is a recent winner of the Bruce Jesson Journalism Prize in support of a book she is writing on the Pike River mining disaster. She lives in Christchurch, where she says the strange and broken has become normal. She and her husband have a 21-year-old son and a 19-year-old daughter.

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Acknowledgements The reports from Christchurch by Rebecca Macfie contained in this BWB TEXT were all first published in the pages of the New Zealand Listener. Bridget Williams Books acknowledges the assistance of Rebecca Macfie and the Listener in making this work possible.

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Published in 2013 by Bridget Williams Books Limited, P O Box 12 474, Wellington, New Zealand, www.bwb.co.nz, [email protected] © Copyright APN Holdings NZ Ltd 2013 This BWB Text is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the prior permission of the copyright holders and the publisher. Inquiries should be made to Bridget Williams Books. ISBN 9781927131862 (EPUB) ISBN 9781927131879 (KINDLE) ISBN 9781927131886 (PDF) DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.7810/9781927131862 Help with your BWB Text Your BWB Text uses high production standards and is built to last. If you are experiencing any issues with this or other BWB titles and require help, your first point of contact is the bookstore or library that supplied access to the work. If they are unable to assist, please contact BWB at [email protected] – we will be happy to help. Edited by Geoff Walker and Philip Rainer Proofread by Jo Scully Cover design by Base Two Digital development by Tom Rennie

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