If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here.
The third time I felt Death’s cold touch was the 22nd of February, 2011 when the city around me trembled and collapsed. 155 people, who were going about their business as normal, lost their lives in the Christchurch earthquake. It was a magnitude 6.3 located right under the city. We didn’t know any of that until much later.
12:51pm. A grinding of plates roared to a crescendo. Back then, we didn’t know what the terrible rumbling meant. Then the floor beneath us swayed and dropped. The shaking knocked me off my feet, knocked the training right out of my head; do we run or walk? Doorway or table?
You stare at your co-workers’ pale faces and share a shaky laugh. Then you descend the stairs on wobbly legs. An office on the fourth floor seems like a stupid idea. You shake in fear when it stops. This queer silence and sunny weather takes over where everything seems the same, but it’s not.
Out on the street, you wait. Phones don’t work, the network is down. Something brown bubbles up in the river. Huge buildings now have cracks running up them, like some sort of spider Halloween decoration. We can see masonry fallen down from the facades of the shopping arcade around the corner.
I hope my family is alright, my child. I don’t know where they are. One of our co-workers was still on her lunch break. We had no idea how widespread the damage was.
I’m lucky.
I was finally allowed to get my car from the carpark and drive home to who knew what. Aftershocks of magnitude 5 still rocked the car every 20 minutes or so.
A false rush hour ensued as every worker in the city left to see their families. Smelly grey mud, called liquefaction, bubbled up from below the ground and covered the roads. I’m wearing stupid high heels so I can’t get out and walk. People pass the car in ones or twos, blindly crossing to get back to check on loved ones. They can walk faster than we can drive. Their faces are covered in mud, dust or blood.
What normally took ten minutes, took me two interminable hours that day. My son was happily playing with his cousin, unaware of the disaster. My family were all fine. But thousands of aftershocks later, I can still feel the panic and uncertainty of that warm, surreal summer’s day.
I still count myself lucky.
If we hadn’t gone through all of that, we would never have made the conscious decision to live life in the now. We would not have packed our bags and taken the kids to live in France for a year. We would still be grinding along, missing out on time with the kids and buying the latest ‘things’. We would not have moved out of the city and met lots of new people. I would not have quit my job and started writing. What a different path it would have been.
So true, so true. I was in Christ Church a couple of years after the quake and again today. It changed so many things. I don’t think anything changes us quite like when death walks so closely by that we feel his ragged breath on the back of our necks. Be it an earthquake or a diagnosis, it changes you. So glad you can see the good in the change. Keep it up!
Thanks! It changes in Christchurch month by month. Slowly a new city is emerging, different from the old one. Luckily, we are no longer dealing with the insurance trap trying to get houses rebuilt. Much harder for those who are to move on.
Wow–powerful. Thank you for sharing this.
Thankyou!
Thanks for sharing this persoal story. It’s true, we often need some major event to be able to see what is realy important and to decide to live the life we want.
I’ve been in two quakes – thankfully both very minor. My cousin and his wife were in Christchurch at the time of the quake there and they told me how bad it was trapped up the coast unable to leave as the access roads were impassable. It’s good that you’ve taken a terrifying experience and turned it into a positive. 🙂
You’re very welcome and thanks for reading. Yes, although it was awful for a long time with aftershocks and repair dramas, I definitely needed the kick in the pants.
Thanks for stopping by! It’s only now I am able to think of it like this, 7 years later.
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Wow this must have been a truly terrifying experience! That you can look at it as a reason you made a change in your life for the better is amazing #blogcrush
Thankyou for the kind comment! Yes it was horrible.