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.
