The Trip Of A Lifetime – Don Mathias

The Trip Of A Lifetime Don Mathias

Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Don Mathias

Okay, what do we do now? It is 5 o’clock in the morning and it’s like the house is drunk. Staggering. Wrenched all over. I mean the ground

had collapsed and somehow—wow—this is all wrong. The property as we knew it has been changed in an instant. There is water all over our

driveway and we have no idea what it was. It certainly looks scungy

but is it sewage, or just the wee bits of vegetation that are naturally on the ground? When you’re unsure of what something is, well, you can imagine all sorts of things can’t you.

This whole thing was totally unreal. We’d literally just come back

from the trip of a lifetime. We’d been away for a whole month in the

United States and only just arrived home. My son was excited because

he’d turned twenty while we were there and the very first thing he wanted to do when we got back was go to the casino. He had reached

the age and so as soon as we got home, off he went. Well blow me if he didn’t arrive back home around two in the morning from the casino with

something like three thousand dollars in his pocket. We were awake, or woken up, and we stoked up the fire while he told us all about it. As you

can imagine he was pretty excited but finally we all got back to bed. A couple of hours later it’s like whoah! That’s an earthquake. With all the

excitement, we really weren’t awake, but we weren’t totally asleep either

when it hit. It was just crazy. The place bucked like a horse. On and on.

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Obviously, we jumped out of bed. The fireguard was covered with

washing and the whole thing had fallen onto the fireplace. We got

those off there pretty quickly while it’s still bucking and carrying on. I went outside then—I opened the door to go outside and I grabbed the

railing out on the patio and stood there in amazement, watching the water come up and listening to the noise of it doing so.

In no time at all the lawn was chocka block, totally awash with it.

Truly, before you knew it we had a big gushing stream down the side

of the house and it’s… it was like a big irrigation pipe. It was hard to

believe what was happening. We stood there holding on to the rail of

the patio as it shook and vibrated with the water jumping all about.

There were gaps in the concrete now too that it splashed up against, like the end of a bath.

It was then that I realised… I’m holding on to the house but the

house is sinking. It’s a really peculiar thing because you’re trying to imagine, trying to understand; what is this catastrophic event and where’s all this water coming from? I mean we’re a block from the river

and it’s like, has the course of the Avon been changed? You’re thinking okay so the rivers coming down here, well, the house is on piles, we’ll

be okay. But then we’re sinking? Yes, I can see the patio is actually

sinking down into the ground. What is going on here? Suddenly I

wasn’t worried about the house collapsing or burning down, but that we are we going to sink into the ground and drown, like one of those

spider trap plants that suddenly engulf you. That’s what went through my mind. I thought we were buggered. Then it stopped. It carried on

pouring water but the vibrations stopped. What was left then was

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just this massive amount of water. I don’t know how many people got outside to see it. I don’t know that many did, but it was impressive and as far as the eye could see—as we could see down Bracken Street here

—there was just water, absolutely amazing. And it was still roaring

past the side of the house. I’ve got photos of all the damage afterwards; you couldn’t believe it would happen so quickly. I grew up on the West

Coast and so I’m familiar with a decent torrent of water. I know what a lot of water looks like. Oh yeah. We were woken out of our beds in the

1968 Inangahua earthquake—now that was a big event—but this, this was something else altogether.

So we knew there had been a massive earthquake, but we didn’t

have any idea where it came from. What might be happening, we had no idea. We also had no power. We knew where the candles were, so

we got those out. We got dressed. There was a bit of trepidation I think, and excitement. Like I said, it was kind of unreal, we were terribly jet-

lagged from just coming back but I don’t remember feeling tired at that point, nothing like that, it was more what do we do now?

We could see quite a lot and I’m not sure where that light came

from, perhaps we had a half decent moon. I don’t know, but it wasn’t

tremendously dark. Maybe we had a torch. I can’t exactly remember but it wasn’t pitch black if you know what I’m saying. Whether it was

the water reflecting whatever light was about or what, I don’t know.

There was a light source somewhere—and later it was certainly a cool, clear morning.

We had a neighbour next door, she’s probably in her eighties I

think. And across the road there was another lady, she hadn’t long lost

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her husband but she was okay, we actually tried to knock on her door but we didn’t raise her. She’s a bit deaf and I think she was in a bolthole

of her own and not moving. And we went across the road and checked

on another neighbour, Tracy. We met her out the front of her place and she had her dog with her, she was carrying her dog, so she wandered

over here with us. Stuff had fallen over in her house, and she didn’t

have a torch or anything to go back inside with, so yeah, back she came with us. We had the fire going of course, but I don’t know whether we

made a drink or not. We’ve also got a camp cooker thing. Did we make a drink? I can’t remember, perhaps we just waited for daylight.

We didn’t have any radios at all but the vehicles had radios and if you

recall with that September one, there was an awful lot of the city that wasn’t particularly affected, not badly, not like later. I can remember

going out quite early in the van, maybe 7.30am or something. I took some of my son’s cash that he’d won at the casino and we went down

and filled up our van with fuel—at that stage there was still fuel in Tuam Street—and we got bread, soft-drinks and water and bits and pieces from another gas station, stocked up on a few bits that I thought

we might need. I could tell as I drove away that we’d been badly affected

but other parts of the city, quite a lot of it, hadn’t been. I knew then we’d have to do something for ourselves because out here in the east it

had hit us very badly indeed. That particular corridor we now know is prone to liquefaction. I don’t know what the folks in Rolleston had to

put up with, what they experienced as far as getting things smashed, but I don’t think that their houses sunk. Here there was a huge amount of liquefaction to deal with. A mind-boggling amount.

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I suppose we were lucky that September day—it turned into a

beautiful day—and we had friends come from all over. They brought shovels and wheelbarrows and got stuck into it. I think after about four days or five days we had most of it gone. I estimated we had about a hundred and twenty metres of liquefaction and silt we’d put out on

the street, out the front there. I am sure we had the biggest pile in the street. We were just about to put some signs on it for a BMX track

when the Council came and took it away. Yeah, it might sound a bit funny doing that but it kind of gave you a sense of regaining some

control. It’s like you’ve got all this horrendous damage around you, everything feels ruined from the back to the front and all around. All

your little treasures and bits and pieces sitting in sheds and wherever, they are all just ruined. Getting stuck into that liquefaction, digging it

out and putting it on the street, it’s almost like you’re reclaiming your

place. I mean you are sitting there waiting, because you had no power, you had no television to watch, you had no radio, so it’s not like you

could see what else was going on. You just had to deal with your own thing.

Then, I’m not sure what the time would have been, maybe 9 o’clock

or something, and a TVNZ guy came through—last thing we needed.

I said, ‘What are you doing around here. Bugger off.’

‘We’ve got a job to do,’ he said,

I said, ‘If you want to do something useful you can go and get a

policeman and tell him to shut this road down.’

Because what had happened—almost instantly—was we had

become the sightseeing capital of Christchurch. Yeah, we had guys on

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motorbikes doing wheel stands down the street, I’m not kidding you.

We were furious. We had people travelling far too quickly through

that water out there. Unbelievably they were going so fast they were

making tidal waves that flowed back into the properties. Eventually, a

policeman did come down and he stopped the traffic up at the corner,

about 300 metres away. I went up to him quietly and I said, ‘Look, there is something else we are going to need desperately and that’s

portable toilets.’ So he gets on his handset and he talks to control, or somewhere, and by about 2.30 in the afternoon I think we were one of the first groups in Christchurch to get portable toilets. Well the water

was off, you know what I’m saying, so those were the first sorts of things you need. You’ve got to put that planning hat on don’t you; ask

yourself what we are going to need. And if we are going to stay here, we’ve got to have a toilet somewhere. You had to look after yourself, and that’s exactly what happened. We were in our own little world, just looking after each other and our neighbours. Quietly getting on with it. But I’ll tell you one thing, the behaviour of non-affected people was

pretty terrible. Like there is curiosity, okay, that’s just human nature I suppose, but yeah, this went too far.

Anyway, cleaning up took a lot of time, quite a few days as I

remember. My workshop—I work for myself—it was out of the picture

if you know what I’m saying. It was not somewhere I could go. We had to get ourselves organised here just to live and carry on. The power

wasn’t quite so bad because we had a friend who had a generator and we were able to borrow it so that meant we didn’t have to worry about

the freezers and the fridge, they were safe. I think that might have

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allowed us to run the telly as well. But yeah, it was just hunkering

down. Working away at what we had to do and trying hard to keep ourselves clean. The boots at the door kind of thing, plus we’ve got

a big garage so we could de-camp all our stuff without bringing it into the house. In fact we did have that nice weather at the time and

while I’m not saying it went back to normal, it went back to something that wasn’t horrendously difficult for us; we weren’t camping, we were

cooking with gas. We had the rudiments, and I don’t think we were that long without water. We did go over to a friend’s place in Hornby for a shower on one occasion, I think we may also have taken some

washing somewhere because as I said, while we were affected that first time, there were lots of folks who weren’t.

My biggest stress was our income. Being self-employed and having

just had a break, I was being forced to take another one. We hadn’t been

on holiday anywhere special since we were married. In saying that, we’d

just done what we could in the car or whatever, never anywhere too

special. We’d not been as far as the North Island or anywhere like that.

Mostly we’d concentrated on paying the mortgage, or as much off the

mortgage as we could afford, in order to get our debt down. So, okay, the kids are growing up and we’d better do this while we can. Four kids and us two, the six of us went away for a month. What you don’t expect is not to be able to work when you get back. All at once a month off was a bit of a problem.

The Government came to the rescue, did the right thing by those

who worked for themselves. They put up some funds that gave us three hundred and fifty a week I think, something like that. It was

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just enough to buy some groceries and a few bits and pieces. That went

on for a little while and it was a big help to a lot of people, not just us.

Then it was like, oh, okay, the insurance companies. We knew a couple of months later, probably by the end of November, that our house was uneconomic to repair. Right from the get go, the first quake, we knew

that. And while we were unlucky to be where we were, it turns out we were very lucky that it was a straightforward, cut and dried, no messing about, sort of case. Just do what needs to be done. We would be getting

a rebuild so then it was just waiting on… what? I think the Crown had set up some discussions about zonings, A, B and C I think they were initially. If I remember correctly they were due to be releasing them at

the end of February. But then that all became a bit redundant on the twenty-second of February, didn’t it, the day the terror started. One of those days when nobody will ever forget where they were.

I was busy in my workshop down in Sydenham when it went off.

Just unbelievable—the horrendous noise. I have mezzanine floors that

surround my workshop and stuff just rained down out of the roof. I

had machinery jumping across the floor and one door to get out. I did this circuit around the machines, ducking and dodging and headed out

into the alleyway. As I went to go through the door the building moved sideways and I ran into the end of the handrail of the stairs. Fortunately

I don’t leave sharp edges on things but I still managed to bury it so far into my shoulder that it totally dropped me. By the time I got myself up and staggered out it was just madness in the car park. There were cars

sliding backwards and forwards knocking into each other and power poles wiggling and the noise was like… well, it was crazy.

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Information got out pretty quickly. I heard that the CTV Building

had collapsed and there were some serious problems, this from one

of the panel beaters next door who had just driven in. Hell, you knew the city had been hit hard because all around us was just buggered. I

started walking then and after a little while I could see the fire in the CTV Building. Smoke all over, rising above the damage that seemed to

be everywhere and so now I’m starting to think, what are we going to

find at home—how bad is it going to be. Yeah, time to find the family.

Time to round them up.

My younger son was at Linwood Intermediate; my biggest boy was

at the Wilding Park tennis complex where he worked. My wife was

around at the rest home, just down in Patten Street, and my daughter

was out at her job in Hornby. Our middle son was out on a Boys’ High trip at Arthurs Pass, so okay, we don’t have to worry about him.

Anyway, back to work, grab the wagon and start to drive home but the

traffic was just a nightmare. I abandoned the van in Phillipstown and walked on home as quickly as I could. I don’t know how far I walked

that day but I thought to myself what a good decision it was. I was walking past people stuck in their cars. I remember there was one lady who had a baby in the car. She was heading back to Belfast but there she was, stuck in traffic, and nearly out of petrol. The poor woman was

beside herself. I don’t know how she got on but there was nothing you could do to help, everything was just gridlocked.

When I got back to Retreat Road there was eighteen inches of

water in the Street. I remember walking up the road and, in a way, feeling quite overwhelmed. It’s like, not again! I can’t believe that we’ve

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had this happen again. In the end we managed to go around through

the neighbours and kept reasonably dry. When I went into the shed I

could see mud where my boy had been home and taken off his boots, so I thought okay, I know he’ s all right. And the long and the short of it was that all the family were okay, nobody hurt, and that was the main thing.

Even so, by the time we were all back home we were standing there

looking at a nightmare. Eighteen inches of water in the street and a foot of water outside the house here, okay, this is serious now. And

because of where I’d just come from, I knew we had serious damage

all over the city. I knew that a man had been killed in Sydenham just

around the corner from me. A friend of mine had lifted the wall off him with his forklift, so yeah, I knew straight away that we had a terrible, terrible catastrophe on our hands. And once again it was a matter of thinking, okay, what is it that we have to do about it.

So same problems again and of course, the liquefaction, but this

time my factory got turned upside down as well. The floor there got busted, there was more liquefaction down there and there was

stuff tipped out all over the workshop. I mean we couldn’t even walk around the damn place, that’s how bad it was. And it’s like, okay, how are we going to make a living. It’s a real factor when you work for

yourself. You have your customer base that has already been knocked

about somewhat, so yeah, what do you do after something like this… take a deep breath and knuckle down. Keep on going. Do what you

can do, one day at a time. You go back and you pick up your nuts and bolts, your bearings and your tools, all that stuff, and then you start

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to realign the machines and things. We’d just put in a big crankshaft grinder. It’s not mine, it belongs to friends, but it’s in the same building, just alongside, and we’d only just got that levelled up—it’s

near enough a four tonne machine and it moved a good five inches.

My lathe, which weighs three tonnes, that moved about eight inches.

What it was, they didn’t move, they stayed put because they weren’t bolted down, they were just sitting there on the floor and when the

earthquake went through it shoved everything along. The whole building and everything moved, just like the old tablecloth trick, you

know, pulling a tablecloth out from under. It’s exactly like that. The machines stayed put and the ground moved underneath them.

So yeah, it was a matter of picking stuff up, sorting out what

was now junk and what was not. There was some water damage but to be honest we haven’t resolved what we are going to do with the

building yet. We did do some repairs, put some plates into where it had cracked. I’m fortunate that one of my customers is a very good builder of commercial buildings and he’s very familiar with these

things. We also had access to my other partner in the building. He builds commercial buildings also, so they had very quick access to

engineers’ designs and plates and so on, it was all installed pretty quickly.

There had been some collapse but it didn’t wrench the building

enough to break things, so in that respect we were kind of lucky. We shaved a bit off the doors here and there and yes, it’s got the slope on

the floor and yes, it gets wet when it rains, but that’s not important

in the context of getting things moving again, making things happen.

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It’s an older building, but we’ve done what we needed to do to stay

there. It’s hard to keep up the energy, not a heap left in the tank but

we’re plugging on. Sadly, my partner that I own the building with, he had to get out of his house in Cranmer Square—even though the house was liveable—because of the likelihood of things falling on it at that time, he had to move. Well, life’s like that right now. You’ve got to be very pragmatic, do what you need to do.

The assistance that the Crown gave us, Ministry of Economic

Development or something, I mean that was absolutely crucial and the

Red Cross, they tipped in some money for us, a grant for some power I

think it was. And it’s those sorts of things that have been really helpful.

We actually run our family on not a lot of money, it’s surprising how

little you can actually run on but when the money stops altogether… well, that’s something else. We had to extend our mortgages to dump cash into the business; there are certain things that have to be paid

for. Plus, I own the building down there, so that has a mortgage on it, and there’s the mortgage on the house. I mean you would never have

borrowed money to go away on holiday if you knew this sort of carry

on was about to happen. But you wait years and years to do something, and it’s like, well, okay, now’s the time we can justify that. Anyway, I’m

glad we had that family time. Like I say, it was once in a life time, but you just don’t know, do you.

We were very lucky that we had Brendon Burns down here to look

after us. Unfortunately, he spent far too much time helping people and

not enough getting re-elected and we lost him. The government might have been looking at the big picture thing, but really, I think it was the

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local people on the ground that did the work. I’m not a member of the Labour Party or anything like that, the only reason I knew Brendon was

because he knocked on my door one day a few years ago and said ‘Can we put a sign on your fence?’ I wasn’t a labour voter at that particular

time and it’s like, I don’t care, whoever had asked, it wouldn’t have bothered me, it’s just about the process. That’s important. He was very good though, he rallied a lot of people and yeah, I think he networked pretty well. He certainly got things up and running.

I rang up the list MP for central, Nicky Wagner, and I lambasted

her about why there were not people getting released from building

projects—building that Southern Motorway for instance—when we’ve got sewage running all over here. Why aren’t we pumping the sewage

to where the system works? I thought our priorities were completely out of control. There was huge contamination and huge problems over

here and there was resource over there, resources that somebody had decided was going to be used to build a new road we didn’t need. I

explained to her that you’ve just got to pipe the sewage from A to B, you don’t have to dump it, you’ve just got to contain it. Well, no, they

just kept dumping it in the river. So don’t ask me what I think about the response from the Crown in that regard. I’ll tell you anyway, I

think it was absolutely disgraceful. And I can tell you now, if it had

happened on the other side of Christchurch, the response would have

been what it should have been, not what it was. You only had to look at what happened to the portable toilets. Where did they majority of

them go initially? You can say whatever you like, words are words, but the picture tells the truth.

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June was pretty scary. I was working—sub-contracting to a plumbing

firm—and I was welding parts onto a new recreation centre, the new swimming pool there. It involved working on top of a scissor-lift— these were the down-pipes for the spouting and I had to weld some brackets onto the steel work. I think we were just about to break for

lunch when the first one arrived. It rumbled through and I wasn’t very

high up on the machine, in fact I think I was leaning on the scissor-lift, standing on a wee ladder welding a bracket on. I thought somebody had backed into us and I was like ‘You careless bugger!’ but of course it

kept going and we soon realised it was an earthquake. When it stopped people were very shaken.

There was about forty guys or so working on site so there was a bit

of a buzz and lots of banging and crashing. They didn’t close the site

as such, we just thought we had better check it all out and that’s okay.

Everybody had their lunch, the nerves settled down and we went back

to work. We moved the scissor-lift from one portal to another portal and now we had it right up as far as it would go, right up under the roof

of the building, and of course the next bugger hit. This one was bigger and it was seriously scary.

There was myself and another fella, he was operating the scissor-lift

and I was doing the welding work. I was actually making a weld when

the quake went through. I had one arm around a big steel beam because

I was standing up and the next second the lift just went absolutely

crazy underneath us. The guy with me is flat out like a starfish on the platform, right. We both had harnesses on but it was absolutely insane

and the lift wasn’t even on concrete, it was on gravel. How it never

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went over I don’t know. My mate was squawking like a stuck pig and I can’t say I was much better. At the same time, what I remember with

absolute amazement was the flexibility the building had. Here there were these big portal beams that go up and across, I’d be guessing they

were twenty by ten-inch-wide beams, hugely thick and they’re braced with big fat inch and a quarter crossed-over reinforcing bars, all bolted together, and that building is still going like a wheat paddock in a high wind, I’m not kidding you. It was flexing big time, and the noise!

What I couldn’t get over, when it had all stopped, were how braces

that had been in tension were buckled from the compression forces.

And the scaffolding. The pools were all done, the tiles were all in place, but they were still doing some of the work up in the ceiling. It must have been plumbing work or whatever and some of the scaffolding

actually jumped out of its feet. It didn’t collapse onto the ground, but this was a massive scaffolding, so that was the kind of kick we got out

there at Papanui and afterwards it’s like ‘Oh god, what are we going to find when we get home?’

Of course after that everything just stopped, no one’s doing anything

after that. So they closed the site down and I gathered up the gear and

jumped in my truck and I was off trying to find my son at Boys High.

Then it’s back through town and I had a truck with an open deck on back so we were able to pick up people who were walking home. I also called in at my mate’s place in Dover Street, I knew he was away and

his wife was there on her own with her new baby, but they were okay.

Then it was back home again and oh gosh, more liquefaction, more

water. But we are all okay, you know, so not to worry. The earthquakes

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could have been a whole lot more catastrophic; I mean folks that have

lost their families, their loved ones, and that’s just incomprehensible.

Okay, we will have to dig out some more liquefaction and this time

all my shelves in the garage had collapsed. The firewood that had been stacked was now all over the place. The welder was tipped over

and of course there was water everywhere again. Stuff had fallen and

broken in the house from that one as well, so it was all a bit nasty, yes, but not like losing family. We’ve still got each other and everyone knows by now what’s important.

Afterwards it’s that continual rattling along isn’t it. You’re always

waiting for it, oh yeah, what’s that? I was doing a clutch job on the

truck at my factory after February, it was a Saturday morning and I

was right in the process of taking the gearbox out when we had one come through. Boy did I skittle out from underneath that truck. It’s

like God… like… you can’t trust Mother Nature anymore. All those

damn aftershocks, it’s got to affect you doesn’t it. I know you can’t help how you feel about it—it just hits you—but it’s always good

when it’s over. Some of those bigger ones start out pretty severely and you’re really on tenterhooks until they settle down.

Boxing Day was an interesting one. There was certainly a heap

of shocks that day. There must have been a couple of dozen or more

by the time we got through that twenty-four-hour period. All a bit surreal really. For some reason I wasn’t worried about them going

off big time, going catastrophic, but I don’t know now why that was.

It’s like we got a bash here and a shake there. I was on the phone to my brother and it’s like, ‘Hear that?’ as another one came rumbling

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through and it was like little bits of energy going by and it wasn’t all that disconcerting to be honest. It’s when they come out of the blue

after three months or something and they just go bang! Whoah!…

yeah, that’s not much fun. I know some people have a terrible… yeah, terrible time with them.

I have a good mate and he’s not short of courage, not when it

comes to doing things that you are in control of. He drives race cars

really fast and all that sort of stuff but an earthquake, when you’ve

got no idea, no protection, no control over it, and of course, have no

idea how long it’s going to go on for, that’s something else again.

That’s the sort of thing that can really knock anybody around. There

is simply nothing you can do about it. For a long time, my wife, Carol, would jump up and head for a doorway or something and I’d

say ‘Just stay where you are, it’s not going to make any difference, you know.’ It’s only taken a few thousand shakes to work that out! And I

know we talk about thousands, but have we got to a thousand that we really felt? I don’t know. We are kind of used to them now, we don’t even look at the websites anymore.

One thing I’ve learnt is that I’m now less tolerant of certain

things. Maybe I’ve never been the most tolerant person, but I reckon

I am less tolerant of people being no good at their jobs. As far as

I’m concerned now it’s like, get your act together. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the school not performing or a customer coming in

wanting something in a hurry and then not picking up their job.

I’m happy to do it in a hurry, but don’t then leave it sitting here, you

know what I mean. I’ve no time for that sort of carry-on. I probably

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wouldn’t have worried too much before, but now, don’t bother ringing me if you’re not genuine.

Yeah, definitely more black and white in that sense, less tolerant

but also more inclined to say to people who do make the effort, who

do make a decent job of things, ‘That’s really good, that’s terrific what you’ve done.’ You let them know you appreciate it. It’s mediocrity I can’t accept anymore. No. Not now. There’s just too much at stake.

Like the insurance companies. How’s this for a story. I was at

tennis one day with my kids and meet a lady there from the other team. She was telling me about working for an insurance company in Auckland and her family are down here. They’d just been told in

the office that there’d been another big one down here. It might have been one of the June ones and the boss man, the manager, comes out into the office and says, ‘For Christ sake, they are going to be the ruination of us.’ That was the response from one of the big boss men

in an insurance company. He has no empathy whatsoever for what is

actually going on in people’s lives. It’s not until you go to Auckland, or some other place that you start to realise just how much we have lost. We’re so busy, heads down, dealing with our bits and pieces that you forget what we had until you go somewhere else. I was down in

Dunedin and you have a look around you and there are the canopies in the streets and there are little mini malls and it’s so vibrant; people

are happy. You look around you and it’s like, yeah, Christchurch, we’ve

had the stuffing knocked out of us. So people like that insurance boss, or these gougers that artificially put up prices for accommodation or whatever—take advantage of people who are most in need—I would

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like to see those people shamed. Publish photographs of these turkeys and say what they did. If I had my way those people would go to a

supermarket and be told they wouldn’t be served. Anyway, this woman

was fantastic. She told me she tore an absolute strip off this guy in the middle of his office. Really gave it to him. ‘How dare you talk like that!’ yeah, so that’s another side of things.

Life is a bit different down here at ground zero. On the whole,

the people affected have tended towards the opposite way of looking

at things, they want to help, not hinder. Before the first earthquake, we had contact with around three neighbours, perhaps four, but right

after the earthquake it’s like you know neighbours all over the place.

Well you’re buzzing around with the tractor helping to clean up silt

and going to meetings and all that sort of carry on—you never know

when the boots going to be on the other foot do you. When you’re

going to need someone to help lift the fridge off your own child. And the other thing is if you’re helping someone else out then you’re not wallowing in your own mess, you know what I mean. You get the kids to help somebody dig out some liquefaction and they’d come back

with vegetables out of the garden or whatever it happened to be. It’s

actually been a pleasure catching up with all these people because in some ways Christchurch is an isolated place; we’ve got these tall fences all over the show. It’s diabolical because fences don’t stop neighbours rowing, but they do isolate people. Being brought up on the West

Coast where you don’t see that sort of thing I’d be happy if they only

allowed fences to be a metre high, just as a separation, if you know what I’m saying.

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The zoning thing, that’s another thing. It’s been a real quandary

really because initially I wanted us to stay green and then I realised

how big a financial hit people who have been left green, may be taking.

I mean who is going to want to buy it if you want to sell on? You know, this green/blue thing with foundations and all that. Like this has been a fantastic home but when we were orange-zoned, we weren’t sure what

we were going to do and so we looked around for sections in town. We couldn’t find anything that we could afford and certainly not anything

like this place. We’ve got nine hundred and fifty metres here and it’s very close to the CBD. It’s still a lovely spot and it will be again but

for us its… well, we’ve been looking further afield and we’ve thought

we might go to Darfield. Man its lovely out there and we thought we could afford a bit of dirt big enough so that I could still have my truck and trailer and my all my gear and whatever on it.

So we looked and waited for a decision from the Crown and Mr

Brownlee said we were going get a decision before Christmas. I’ve

got a letter from him on my computer and I released it to The Press.

But when The Press talked to him, he said, ‘Sadly, no, we’ll miss the deadline. I got that letter four days before Christmas. I got it on the Monday. A letter from Mr Brownlee to say that we’d have the decision

before Christmas, and I released it to The Press because it was some

good news, and then it’s, no, sorry, so how far out of control is that?

It’s like, okay, thousands of people are already red-zoned, they knew

they had to go, so we were desperate for an answer. Do you see what I mean? We needed to know, we needed to buy something while there was anything left that we could afford.

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We’d actually looked in August at this piece of ground in Darfield

and it was quite a nice section but until you know, you can’t do anything.

Your hands are tied. Then as soon as we were finally red-zoned, we

looked at another piece of land which was a wee bit more expensive, a

real nice bit of dirt, so we had a go at that—put in an offer on that— but no, we missed it, so back we went to this other one. Finally, we were able to buy land in Darfield but unfortunately we only get a pittance

for our home in the red zone. That’s the tragedy of it. Our land here is worth two hundred and twenty-one dollars a square metre. Four

houses up the road it’s over three hundred. Across the road they’re

getting a better price as well. We’re probably sixty thousand shy of what the true valuation of the place is. You have to understand, this

was our retirement—it’s a double section—it’s got the house on it… anyway, it is what it is, and that’s the valuation we’ve got to accept.

Never mind, we were able to take possession of a big plot in Darfield

and we can relocate out there. I may even sell my building in Sydenham and relocate my business out there… I don’t know yet. At least out there they have wire fences and you can talk to your neighbours.

It’s going to take some time. I don’t think we’ll be in our new Darfield

house until Christmas next year. That’s the sort of timeframe we’re

looking at. Next Christmas would be okay, but our most concerning

thing right now is that the Crown want us out of here in less than a year, eleven months from now. And that really is unfair.

They say that when push comes to shove they will probably give

us an extension, well give us the extension now. There could be five to

eight hundred people that are in this same boat and it’s like, hey, this

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is a really significant thing, let’s have the discussion. What is it going

to take to keep the infrastructure going until our homes are built?

People are waiting for their land to be released, or they are waiting for insurance matters to be settled, they’re waiting for this and that. We are here now; if it’s cold in the morning, we light the fire, we’ve got

a flushing toilet, we’ve got water, we’ve got power, we’ve got a phone, and we’ve got a house that’s got a twenty-inch slope on it, but where are we going to go? The crazy thing is the Crown’s going to be putting up money if we do have to go—they pay a subsidy of around three

hundred and thirty a week, something like that, for rent—so they will

be paying for it anyway. Why not just say, hang on, we’ve been here now for nearly two years. We’ve got no bus services or whatever but

we still pay full rates, we’re not getting any relief. But no, they want us

out of here and I’m not sure how we deal with that. Right now we can’t even get anyone to draw us a plan for a home.

At some point it will happen, we will be in a new house and I think

at that stage, if things work out okay with the insurance company, I’ll probably be able to relocate my engineering business onto the same

land. It’s an activity I’m allowed to do there and we’ll also be working

on landscaping and growing a garden and so on. In five years’ time I will

be sixty and I would like to think that we can look back and say, okay, we’ve made it. I’d also like to think that the people of Christchurch are going to be treated a whole lot better than they are now.

I’m happy that we are going to end up in Darfield, out of the rough

and tumble of town. It might sound funny for a person involved with motorsport and noisy engines and stuff like that, but I will not miss

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the exhausts in Christchurch. The rebuild is going to take a long, long time. What will happen with my own children, I’m not sure. That will

be up to them of course. As yet they don’t have a financial interest in Christchurch, if you know what I’m saying, so it’s more where their

jobs and their education will take them. I would suggest they will

probably stay. They are not desperate to run away. I’m not desperate to run away either, it’s simply been forced upon us.

As for Darfield itself, it’s not too far from Christchurch and I’m

quite comfortable that we’ll be safe out there with a new house, built to the new earthquake standards. We want to design a house out there

to retire in. No doubt we could put up a big house off some plan— something within the confines of what the insurance company will pay

for—set it all up with nice bits and pieces then put it on the market and you could probably do really well. I’m sure there are people that

are moving to places and just buying the land and doing that sort of

thing so they can sell up and leave Christchurch, or do whatever they want to do, but that’s not us. We are looking at what is it we need for

our retirement. I don’t want money; the reality is it’s of no use to me.

I just want somewhere to park my truck and trailer and to live in a comfortable house that doesn’t cost a lot of money to run. Somewhere for the grandchildren maybe later on and that’s the end of it

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