Are You Sure You’re In The Red Zone – Gail Pringle

Are You Sure You’re In The Red Zone Gail Pringle

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Gail Pringle

My name is Elizabeth Gail Pringle, but just call me Gail, everybody does. Now, where to start? It’s not like I’m reliving it all now, some

of it has become more like memory. So, the beginning. Yes, in bed.

That’s where I was when it started. I jumped out, very quickly.

Hubby stayed where he was.

‘What are you jumping out of bed for?’

‘Because this is a big one and I don’t know if the house is going

to stand up to it.’

‘Course it will,’ he said.

‘Yeeeah, I’m not so sure about that sweetie.’

And then it just stopped so I put my housecoat on.

‘Now where are you going?’ he said.

‘I’m going to see who else has a house that’s still standing!’

‘Was it that bad?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘it was.’

And then off I went to the front door and all I could see when I

opened it was water. Everywhere.

Oh bugger, the water main’s burst. That’s what I first thought.

Then I could see it was coming up the drive and I’m thinking, oh

bugger again. It’s going to come in the house. I closed the door pretty quickly and went off to get some towels to put down. Then I

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just stood there for a bit and pondered—okay—now what do we do?

First things first, we had a Japanese student staying with us so I

thought I’d better go and check on her. She didn’t even feel it. Where

we were in our bedroom, that part of the house had dropped, but the

part of the house that she was in never moved. Not in September. So, she didn’t feel a thing, she didn’t even know why I was waking her up in the dark.

We had no power, but her phone was there so we used it to find the

torches. As usual the batteries weren’t working so the general consensus at that point was, there’s nothing much we can do. Still, I was curious

to find out what was going on so I find my shoes and off I go. Yeah, big mistake. I went out to have a chat with a couple of the neighbours and

immediately got wet feet. The water poured straight in, it was way over

my shoes. Anyway, they were saying that their houses were in pretty

bad shape, they weren’t even sure if they were going to go back inside.

They were talking of driving out then and there. I advised them not

to because of the water; you didn’t know where the holes would be, so

they kind of stuck around for a wee bit. I offered them a cup of coffee,

we still had the gas, but they were all busy doing their own thing, which is understandable. Some of them we never saw again. Others we did see, but yeah, some of them took flight almost straight away. As soon as the light arrived they were gone.

Not us, we jumped back into bed until we could see what we were

doing. Once it got light Garry said he’d go down to the petrol station

and see if he could get some batteries. The petrol station was history.

Next stop the shops. On one side the shops were also history, the other

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side was okay so he managed some batteries but of course they had

been there for a while so they weren’t as good as they might have been.

The shop couldn’t accept anything except cash and Garry says, ‘Okay, here’s twenty dollars, give me what I can get for twenty dollars, I need bread and batteries,’ and that’s what he got.

By the time he’d walked back he had more of an overview, more idea

of what the area was like. We had no power—we’d figured that one out in the middle of the night. So, the next question, if it was that big, and

if we are not the epicentre, where the hell was. We had sent texts out to family around the country but didn’t hear anything back which was

really quite frightening. Finally we heard from family in Christchurch, probably about 6 am, saying they were okay, shaken, but okay. Those

in Wellington we didn’t hear from and we were a bit concerned about that because we thought it could have come from anywhere. Eventually

we jumped in the car, turned the radio on and got nothing—all the stations were dead. We tried to find the national station but they were

just playing music, it wasn’t until probably 7 o’clock that they started to say Christchurch had had a major earthquake. So that’s when we realised that it was us—predominately us—so okay, you think about your next move and kind of proceed from there.

At first it wasn’t easy to get out at all. The only door we could

actually get through was the back door; the front door was impossible

because of the liquefaction. The garage door was okay, we could move that up and down but other doors we couldn’t get out of because of the

liquefaction. It was up three bricks high on the wall so if you’d opened

them it would just have come inside. Around the back, the back door,

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it was up to the bottom rail of the aluminium so we opened it very

gingerly with brooms and spades and then pushed the sand one way and stepped out the other way. At that point it was very sloppy, like

quicksand. In the end we just had to leave it to dry before we could actually do anything with it. That took two or three days.

I woke up on the Monday and oh bugger, the fairies still hadn’t

come to take it all away. They hadn’t brought us any power or water either but we had got the landline back on. We rang up a friend of ours who came over and dug out from our ranch-sliders through to

the back gate so we could get out. Then my brother came on the Tuesday and he dug out all the back and then the students came a

few days later and helped dig up the rest. We had about twenty cubic metres of silt to dig out on the September one. We had another three tonnes in the February and the same in June.

Of course in a situation like this you don’t know how long you are

going to be without bits and pieces. We were in pretty good shape.

Food wise we started emptying out the freezer because that’s the

first thing you do. And then the barbeques came out. We had a bit of a dinner with the neighbours who had some fresh chicken, well

that had to be cooked didn’t it. And then we had a potluck dinner, which I think we all needed. The camaraderie that such things bring

certainly helped. That started the ball rolling and that group of us

have been very close-knit ever since. We meet more or less on a monthly basis and even though we have started to spread all over

the place these days, it still happens which is great. That was the silver lining.

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I work from home so I was there for all the earthquakes bar the

December one. But that first one, September, I think that was the one that hit me the most. I just went into a state of depression quite

quickly. That seems to be the way I operate. I help people first and then

after about two weeks I go into depression. So, I knew what was going to happen. But I also knew if I kept myself busy then I was going to be fine, and so that’s what I did.

I joined CanCERN to keep me busy and because I wanted to know

what was going on. It was an organisation that came out of the grass

roots of those that were affected. Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Affected Neighbourhoods—that’s what it stands for. It came about from a group of people who were very concerned that nothing was

happening or that nothing seemed to be happening. I wanted to help people and I knew that this was a way I could do it. I had no work

anyway. I’d been drawing houses since I was five but never felt I had the range to become an architect so I decided on drafting instead. At one

point I was made redundant, just before the share market crash hit, and

decided now’s a good time to try and have a family. Well, that didn’t

happen so we flagged that idea and I ended up eventually starting out on my own. That was fine but as soon as the first earthquake arrived all my renovation work just stopped.

CanCERN was mainly set up around Avonside, Horseshoe Lake,

Kaiapoi, basically those areas that were badly hit in September. And then

of course February hit and everyone said this is the first earthquake and

we said, hold on a minute, we’ve had a whole six months of this stuff.

We were meeting weekly and we were putting in long hours, five or six

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hours some evenings, and some of it was during the day as well because

we weren’t working. We were just trying at first to get a handle on what was needed, who needed it, where they needed it and how we could

get it there. When the Student Army came about it was an absolute

Godsend because most of us in the organisation were my age and we didn’t have the energy to be digging up liquefaction. What we did have

was the expertise and social acumen—we had the social network to understand and relay people’s concerns—and that was very important.

To begin with, the authorities just wanted to feed us the information

and we were saying no, you need information from us. We knew there

was a conduit required and we wanted to make it go both ways. It took a while but eventually they seemed to realise yes, actually, we were a good thing; we could tell them very quickly—particularly after the February one—what was needed and where.

That day in February though, we didn’t realise how bad it was at first.

We knew we’d had a biggie—we were back to liquefaction and back to the same problems we had before—but it wasn’t until we got hold of

a generator and saw the news that we realised it was even worse than we’d thought. That was a bit harder to swallow. Garry had tried to ring

us after the earthquake but he couldn’t get through, so straight away

he was in the car and coming home. He actually got stuck at one point and they had to tow him out but really the worst of the damage seemed to set in once he got home. After a while you couldn’t get out if you’d wanted to.

We had to get the generator because we didn’t know how long we

were going to be without power; they were saying possibly three or

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four weeks, and we didn’t really want to move out because if we did the house wasn’t secure. With no power, the garage door just opens and closes and so on. In one way you become very insular and don’t want to leave your patch too much. When you’re there you felt it was safe

but if you went somewhere else you weren’t quite sure. We had a new

Japanese student staying with us by then too. The first one stayed right the way through. She thoroughly enjoyed it. She’s coming back at the

end of the year. She just grew beautifully through it all. Before it she’d been a little bit self-centred, as teenagers can be, but after it happened

she seemed to realised there was more to life than looking inwards and that out in a wider world you could do just about anything. After

that she really blossomed. The second one—she was doing really well

too—she wanted to stay on with us but the school made her leave and

she didn’t really react well too that. She wanted everything to go back to normal and I had to say to her it wasn’t going to happen. Life won’t

be going back to normal for a little while yet. But you know, we talked and we kind of got through it.

At that point I didn’t really want to go through another one either

but there wasn’t a lot of choice involved was there. We still had water, we still had everything else and we had our emergency system in place by then. We got to the stage where we had competitions for putting the

generator on—who in the street could do it the fastest. Lots of amusing little things like that. You know, in September we were sharing a porta-loo with twenty-three families—not people, families! When you tell

that to someone from out of the area they say, ‘Why don’t you guys just dig a hole?’ Well, you just couldn’t, the water was too high. Talk

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about neighbourly though, with those port-a-loos you got to know your neighbours very well indeed.

Oh shit! That was my very first thought when it happened again

in June. Garry got home before the second one hit which was good because if he’d got home any later I don’t think he would have got here at all. The phone was out again of course and by then… in a way

it’s hard to explain, but when it went quiet it meant you didn’t have

to talk to people. It was a bit like grieving, when you lose somebody, sometimes it nice not to have to talk about it all the time.

Water. Water was interesting. Water is perhaps the hardest thing.

Electricity too, when you don’t have that everything slows down. Your

normal routine, everything just stops. It’s not until it comes back on that life as we know it gets back to somewhere normal.

Water though, when there is no water, you have to go out for it. You

have to go out for washing, you have to go out for showering, a simple thing like that becomes a planned event. Something you did during

the latter part of the day but not in the evening. You couldn’t come

home after dark because you didn’t know where the holes were. If it rained the holes changed, so your landscape was forever changing and

even if you travelled on one road all the time, it was totally different

the next day. Yeah, that was how life was and then June happened and

we thought, oh God, here we go again. After that we had no idea how long we were going to stay.

We had told ourselves we would probably be out by Christmas, but

that, we knew, was kind of flexible. And the truth is that until you get to a certain point, you didn’t really want to move out. Where you might

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move to and how long it would all take, there are so many unknowns, which doesn’t make anyone feel good. But then things began to happen.

We were able to get the accommodation allowance sorted out and we

had more satisfaction with the insurance company so I began to feel more comfortable with the idea of moving.

It all came together on the twentieth of December, just two days

before the Christmas earthquake. We were back in the house taking

down the drapes when it hit. We had bought the salvage rights for

the place so we were able to take what we wanted out of it. About lunchtime we headed over to Brighton for something to eat and the

first one hit while we were there. Then the second one was while we were in the car park and the third one arrived after we had packed

the car and were just about to leave the property. The liquefaction was coming up to meet us as we drove away. To watch that happening behind us, to know that we did not have to dig it out, that we did

not have to wait for the power to come back on—that we could just disappear from it all—that was bliss. We have loaned our generator

to neighbours across the road who were staying and they have used it

several times since then because the power is not very reliable, but yeah,

I’d have to say it was nice to get away. The east side was such a mess.

My sister-in-law’s shop was an absolute mess. She owns a hairdresser’s

and two days before Christmas everything was back on the floor again.

It’s really hard being there.

For us though, it was like you blink and you are somewhere else. We

drove over here to where we are staying now and did some Christmas shopping. We had run out of booze coming up to Christmas and we

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got some meat, then we got some stuff from the dairy and we thought

bloody hell, this is like a totally different place. And it was. It’s not that you don’t feel the shakes here, you do, but you don’t get the same

emotional fright with it. You know it’s coming, you know because you

hear it—you feel it. But you also know the house is going to stand up.

You know it’s not going to come down around your ears. You know you are not going to be stuck inside. Psychologically you’re in a very different state of mind.

It was something we’d experienced before, that difference in

feeling. Earlier on we’d had to go across town to buy groceries and to get money out of the bank because there weren’t any banks open

on the east side. There were no petrol stations, there was nothing.

Everything was a trip, and it was a foreign trip because we hadn’t shopped over that way before. Everything was unfamiliar to us for so

long, you felt like a refugee in a strange city. It was really quite weird.

People would be going about their lives and things seemed to be—

well, normal. They would be dressed in clean clothes and going about their business while we would be in dirty clothes because we couldn’t

get them washed, or even dried if it was raining. And on our feet we’d be wearing our gummies. When it rained you couldn’t wear anything else. I went to the hairdressers in my gummies and I’m thinking, you look like a country bumpkin, but shoes were impossible.

At least now we have a place to go. We are going to build out at

West Melton and it will be a project of love, which is the opposite of

just a place that is built. It’s a place we have chosen—we had to do it—but we have chosen it, as opposed to being told, this is where you

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have to go. That was one thing that was really quite frightening after

the September and February quakes, all these rumours going around about how we’d be told to go to particular places, without any choice

at all. We were thinking no, that’s just not going to happen. People need to have the involvement; they need to be making the decisions

themselves. You can’t force people. We know people in Horseshoe

Lake who haven’t moved on but you can’t force them—they’re not

ready yet. They haven’t got all the information they need to move on

and you have to try and give that to them. I understand the need to get on and do things but people need to come first, not bureaucracy.

What have we learnt from all this? That anything is possible and

that time will take care of everything. That going through earthquake

after earthquake is like going through a very large grieving process.

That there will be a certain amount of chaos and we all have to become

more independent, more self-sufficient. That the east side of the city is currently in a very angry state—we all know what happened but

you still have to go through that stage. And that we no longer rely on everything to stay as it is, because we know now it doesn’t.

I’ve learnt it makes you a little bit crazy too. We all laughed when

I planted lettuces in the liquefaction, something I did just as a joke, but they actually grew. And before we left in December I threw some

flower seeds out in the front lawn and they have all grown. Decorating the thousands of road cones that surround us all, things like that. We

do things now because it is fun. You don’t worry anymore about what

somebody is going to think or what somebody is going to say, it’s just, what the heck—it’s fun! It felt good to do it. We put tinsel around a

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tree the other day, two of us just ran around the tree because that was the easiest way to do it and a neighbour thought we were going nuts

and we said, ‘Ha! that’s fine, we don’t care, we are nuts.’ Sometimes you’ve just got to let your hair down and get a little eccentric.

Perhaps we’ve learnt to be a lot freer but I’ll tell you something

else we’ve learnt, not to take crap. What has happened to people—

the way some of these insurance companies have behaved—they

have taught people to fight, and afterwards, people in Christchurch, on the east side in particular, aren’t going to take bull-shit lightly.

They won’t. And once things start getting back to normal, or semi-

normal—which they are not yet and won’t be for another few years— that feeling will still be in the back of people’s minds. They will be

very resistant to rubbish because they know they don’t have to put up with it. These are people who have fought eighteen months or so with EQC, eighteen months or so with insurance companies, with people in Auckland that have no idea and leave you pulling your hair out

just trying to get things done. Like what came out of the mouth of

this… this girl… sitting at a desk in Auckland, when we were about to move out.

‘Oh no,’ she said, ’you can’t move out because the house is habitable.’

I said, ‘I beg your pardon, the power is about to be cut off !’

‘Yes, but are you sure you’re in the red zone—are you really sure

that you’re in the red zone?’

You couldn’t get angry with them because they didn’t know what

they were doing. They didn’t realise how stupid they were. These are

the representatives of insurance companies—their first tier. You could

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go on to the second tier but I tried to persist with the first lot because I felt it was educational for them.

Given enough time and money you can solve anything can’t you,

but the emotional thing, that’s a bit different. Sometimes you see in

your friends what you have just gone through yourself—or perhaps

what you are about to go through. You see it in the families trying to get each other through the bits and pieces when half the time they still

don’t really know what’s happening. But having your family or friends there, having someone giving you the support that’s needed, that’s so

important. These days you look at people slightly differently, you look at their mental health more than you ever used to.

‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’

Then it’s, ‘How are you really?’

I mean it’s all very well fobbing things off, but people don’t do that

now as much as they used to. We are all a bit more honest about things.

Okay, you don’t open up to everybody, but there’s a—do you really want

to know, or do you just want the polite version. If they really want to know, then people talk, and people listen.

The Salvation Army coming around after September was absolutely

brilliant. The Maori Wardens coming around in February—that was

unbelievable It just gave you a sense of pride. I can’t tell you how good it was to know that someone out there just wanted to make sure you were okay. The police came around and they were great too, they were

absolutely fabulous. They came around two or three days after each event and asked if we had enough water and each time I said yes, and I

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hadn’t. It was really weird; I just didn’t want to be a bother. Sometimes

when people say no, it’s not what they really mean. And the guy looked at me and he said, ‘I’m going to leave you some anyway. And if you

want some more, come and see me, I’m just down the road.’ That was beautiful. That was special, because I suddenly clicked as to what I had done. I did it both times, you know, and I’d probably do it again

because that’s the way I am. Well, there were people worse off than me.

There are only the two of us, my husband and I, we weren’t… we didn’t

have a family and we were coping. We had enough to get by on and you didn’t want to steal it from somebody else who needed it.

I suppose what all this has taught us is that you can do anything. That

you can get through things. It hasn’t given me a false sense of—what do you call it—survival or anything like that but it’s made me aware that things can happen. That you can be knocked down and you can get

back up again. You can get through it. My ideal future would be to have a more stable environment—yeah, that’s probably a fancy word for not

losing my house again. But the truth is my working life has never been that stable so that doesn’t really concern me too much. Just to be able

to do the things I like to do, without too much hindrance, that would be nice. But if something happens, well, something happens, and that’s

all there is to it. I guess what all this has helped me realise is that the world does not end suddenly. You get to your feet, you stand up again and you just keep going. You get through it.

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