BUT CITIES ARE MORE THAN landscape or building. They are people and the routines we create to link us to people. In 1992 I soon felt comfortable in this city. I met good people. The marriage was irretrievably over. One day towards the end of my residency, I walked round the corner and came upon an agent nailing a ‘For Sale’ sign to the fence of a little cottage. The one I had been imagining all those months — with the verandah and the open fire, sash windows either side of a green front door.
Within a week, I owned it, along with a scary mortgage. I moved in my bed and my computer and a painting by Lindsay Crooks. Someone lent me a sofa. I got a job shelving books at a library. I had moved to Christchurch.
A couple of years later, I sold that first house to buy another exactly like it on the peninsula. A man had rung to ask if I would teach at a spring school in Akaroa. He came into town to discuss it, sat on my borrowed sofa in front of my inadequate fire. The dream house was lovely, but those polished floors left gaps under every door through which swept icy draughts. I was systematically burning my way through an old dunny in the backyard. Its timber boards flared in the grate with a brief intensity and were ashes in seconds.
The dunny could not last forever.
The next week, the man returned with my contract and a stack of dry firewood in the back of his 1967 Cortina station wagon. Old pine, manuka. The room filled with their steady, warming glow.
It was the best gift anyone anywhere had ever given me. I married him. I sold the cottage to fund my share of an old farmhouse in a tiny bay between the lava flows of the peninsula. My husband altered the front rooms to become accommodation for walkers on a coastal track. The back we kept for us.
It was beautiful. The hillsides were clothed in regenerating bush. Kereru swooped. Bellbirds chimed. The sea lay only 50 metres away, shallow and swimmable on a sandy beach. But I missed the city. I am at heart a town mouse, bored and lonely away from the busyness of streets, friends dropping in, the ease of popping out to shops and movies. I missed the dropping in, the popping out, and when my mother died and I had some money, I bought a flat.
It was close to the centre of the city, at the corner of two of the avenues. One of a set of four built in 1941: weatherboard, concrete tiled roof, a tiny section where I planted more roses and espaliered a cherry tree because I don’t see the point of planting trees in a garden that don’t bear fruit and the delicate ephemera of blossom. Technically, the flat was intended to be a rental, a sensible investment for two people incapable of saving a penny, something to sustain a probably impecunious old age.
In the event, it was never rented. Friends used it when they were between jobs or visiting the city. My younger daughter and her partner lived there between stints on the offshore islands — Raoul, Maud, Codfish — where they worked with kakapo and other endangered species. The flat filled with crampons and climbing ropes, surfboards and snowboards tumbled from the cupboards. My granddaughters were born in the flat, one in the bedroom as a nor’wester breathed hot and gusty, the other in the still of night, sliding, still packaged in the caul, into a paddling pool in the sitting room. I stayed in the flat whenever I was working late, or when I simply craved the city, the sensation of living in the midst of all those other parallel lives.
WE WERE ASLEEP IN THE FLAT one spring morning when it began to tremble and through the pillow, felt in the bone, rather than heard, rose a roaring as the walls jolted back and forth and the whole building, the street, the entire city was shoved into a new era. Forty kilometres away, on that broad green plain, a gash had ripped across a paddock.
Just a minor tectonic adjustment, an insignificant fault. No one even knew it existed, buried there, more than 10 kilometres down beneath a thick blanket of grey shingle. Only 27 kilometres long. We didn’t suspect it for one moment as we clambered from sleep to the doorway where we had learnt long since that safety lay, though in this instance we were wrong. We had chosen to stand right under the water tank: a few hundred weighty litres slopped back and forth above our heads. But we presumed safety there, as we presumed the Alpine Fault.
This was it. The quake we had been warned about all our lives. The faultline that had forced up the mountains of the Main Divide. Six hundred and fifty kilometres of brooding tension that had hovered forever like some moustachioed villain in the wings, awaiting the moment to make his entrance. When that fault ruptured, we had been told, you will shake. The magnitude of a quake is directly related to the length of its faultline and when the Alpine Fault goes, it will be an 8, maybe bigger. The land will shrug you aside like some annoying little tic.
We hadn’t anticipated a tiny crack opening a few kilometres away on tame, flat dairy land.
But 27 kilometres is long enough; 7.1 will do it in an explosive 40 seconds of release. The city jolted around us in the early morning dark like a baby in big violent hands. Glass broke. Mortar crumbled. Concrete cracked. Friends whose home was almost directly over the fault out at Greendale were tossed straight into the air and came to, spreadeagled on the bedroom carpet. Another woke to himself scrambling over fallen bookshelves down the hallway to his children, who cried in their bedrooms in the dark. One had simply pulled over the quilt, resigned to death. Four hundred and eighty thousand people woke simultaneously to a forceful reality. The land that lay beneath the city was reasserting its primacy. The peninsula hills rose as if they were no more than featherweight. They skipped like lambs, as the psalmist sang, describing just such a momentous and now forgotten event:
The mountains skipped like rams and the little hills like lambs.
What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? …
Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams; and ye little hills, like lambs?
Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob;
Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.
The peninsula skipped all right. The plains rippled as waves of unfettered energy passed through and out into the wide ocean. Springs long hidden burst up into the light once more in those tiny volcanic cones of white silt bubbling with milky water. Roads and buildings burst and buckled and maps with their grids and mathematical presumption proved to be puny things, no more than the scratchings of children on a sandy beach.
The kitchen floor was covered in broken glass. It glittered like unseasonable frost. We swept up what we could. We walked out into the fragile morning. Sunlight dazzled and the very air seemed filled with dancing particles. We were tiny on the shimmering surface of the Earth. We were little creatures emerging after a great storm from our burrows to take a first tentative step into this revised version of our map, where chimneys had torn holes in the roof, cars were buried by bricks and the façade of the bagel shop lay face down across the road, its upstairs flat torn rudely open like some doll’s house to the dancing air. People took photos, they gathered before the evidence of the morning, their voices high pitched and garrulous with relief.
No one had died.
The quake had struck at 4.35 on a Saturday morning. People were not at work but safe at home in houses built to proper regulation. There was to be no hideous urban catastrophe like the ones we witnessed overseas. In Haiti nine months earlier, a quake less powerful than our own, a 7, had resulted in utter devastation and social chaos. A year earlier, in L’Aquila in Italy, a 6.3 quake had tumbled stone and concrete, killing 309 and injuring more than 1500.
But we had escaped. Thanks were given at Sunday services across the city for our escape and the skills of our engineers and the city settled to repair while the aftershocks rattled through. One hundred, 1000, 5000, until no one bothered counting any more. (At the time of writing, four years after that initial shock, the total exceeds 14,000, including fifty measuring more than 5 on the Richter scale. There were a couple of tiny jolts just last week, a discreet little cough from that shadow in the wings.) The children returned to school and The Press published a commemorative book of photographs
: The Big One.
THE TITLE PROVED PREMATURE. Five months later, on 22 February 2011, another fault, also previously unsuspected, fractured beneath the city. This truly was a Big One, smaller on the scale than the first — a 6.3 — but it was shallow and fierce and it struck at 12.51 p.m. on a working day. One hundred and eighty-five people died, in hideous circumstances, crushed by concrete, masonry or the rocks that tumbled down from the steep slopes of the Port Hills. One hundred and sixty-four people were seriously injured, losing limbs, losing sensation. Thousands of others were uninjured but suffered other kinds of loss.
An earthquake is the most egalitarian of disasters. It strikes an entire region at one blow. Fires spread, floods rise and surge, landslips take out one valley but, blocked by physical barriers, spare another. An earthquake, however, hits with absolute even-handedness. At a single instant, hill and plain rise as one, and hundreds of thousands of individuals experience the same few seconds of intense release. For that instant, we move in unison, rocking to the west, rocking to the east, raised abruptly up, dropped abruptly down.
As soon as we come back to earth, the temporary unison is shattered. We hit the ground as individuals and from that second, our narratives differ. We hit the ground knowing that we do not exist in a calm or orderly universe.
In this city, buildings that had survived the first quake and were presumed sturdy proved to be frail structures, inadequately engineered. The Pyne Gould Corporation building, designed in 1963, slumped, killing fifteen beneath tonnes of concrete and weakened steel. The CTV building that housed the city’s television station, a language school and counselling services, had been constructed back in 1986 under the guidance of a man whose qualifications proved, in post-quake investigation, to have been completely fraudulent. This building collapsed in a matter of seconds, killing 115 people. They died, some after hours sending texts of unbearable poignancy to those they loved, trapped beneath a great shifting mountain of concrete as fire spread through the ruins.
How will the city recover from death and injury? How does it recover from destruction? One hundred thousand homes have been damaged, 25,000 seriously enough to require total rebuild or major repair. Seven thousand, eight hundred and sixty homes stand on land so damaged that they cannot be rebuilt but are zoned for demolition. Seven hundred and thirteen houses on the Port Hills are declared uninhabitable because of the risk of rock fall from the slopes above, or the collapse of those high cliffs of fragile volcanic ash. Six hundred and forty hectares of riverside land are no longer habitable because of flood risk. Forty of the city’s fifty-one high-rises are no longer safe and must come down. Seven hundred and forty-two commercial buildings — around 70 per cent of the CBD — are to be demolished, some from necessity, some at their owners’ discretion. Eight and a half million tonnes of rubble must be disposed of. Two and a half billion dollars worth of ‘horizontal repairs’ to the basic fabric of the city are required: 25 kilometres of wastewater pipes must be relaid, 18 kilometres must be relined and eight new pumping stations built. Eight kilometres of fresh-water pipes must be repaired, fifteen bridges and 62 kilometres of road, all this if people are to live without digging latrines in their backyards, boiling drinking water or finding raw sewage bubbling up through the bath plug, because the fundamental requirement of civilisation, it seems, is not being able to invest capital or impose the rule of law or go to the symphony, but finding a way to dispose of your own shit. Week by week the pile of figures builds. It is all going to cost $10 billion to repair. Then $30 billion. Then $40 billion.
I am innumerate. I have trouble getting my head around figures. To come even close to imagining these amounts I have to use John Allen Paulos’s trick that replaces dollars with minutes. A million minutes is twelve days. A billion minutes is thirty-two years.
Faced with all those centuries of dollars, how will the city recover, in a small country whose GDP is less than the revenue of a single company? Less than Walmart? Less than General Electric? Less than Exxon Mobil?
AN EARTHQUAKE IS NOT SIMPLY a geological event. It occurs within a specific social and political context.
In 2010, that context was a country that two years earlier had voted in a conservative National government, led by a former Merrill Lynch banker, John Key. His ambition, often repeated, was to create a nation where it would be ‘good to do business’. And earthquakes, as Naomi Klein has pointed out, like wars, can be very good for business.
That context was a city governed by a city council of thirteen elected representatives, two from each of six city wards and one representing the residents of Banks Peninsula, that volcanic mass that now lay within the city’s boundaries following amalgamation in 2006. The city’s mayor was Bob Parker, elegant and eloquent, a former television presenter, born and raised here.
That context was a province, whose environment — air, lands, coasts and waters — was under the administration of a regional council, one of those catch-all entities of the mega-sized, blockbuster 80s. Thirty-three small local bodies had been boiled down to a single entity in 1989 and named, as was the fashion, with a double noun: Environment Canterbury, usually shortened to ECan.
Until early 2010, ECan was directed by fourteen councillors, democratically elected at three-yearly intervals. But in May of that year central government ordered the council’s dissolution. The stated reason was that the council was ‘dysfunctional’, which meant, in essence, that a good proportion of the councillors returned by the elections of 2007 opposed a major irrigation scheme planned for the Canterbury Plains.
The Chinese and other Asian countries had begun consuming New Zealand’s dairy products in increasing quantity. They were buying infant formula as Westernised notions of infant nutrition displaced traditional breastfeeding. They were buying nutriceuticals designed to combat osteoporosis in women not previously considered prone to the disorder. A ‘key success story’ reported by the country’s leading exporter of dairy products, Fonterra, in 2006, was a joint venture with General Electric, which had involved the distribution of thousands of bone-scanning devices to medical clinics throughout Asia. They detected bone-weakness in women and Fonterra found a market for a preventative: a calcium-enriched milk powder, Anlene. The product drew some criticism from medical professionals who objected to scaremongering and pointed out the risks of high calcium intake. But Anlene sold, and in a country that has always based its economy on the production of raw materials like timber, wool and meat that is what mattered. Dairy-based products were now New Zealand’s most valuable commodity.
Cows, as Darwin once observed, need pasture. And growing numbers of cows need more pasture and pasture requires water and on the dry plains around the city that meant irrigators, hundreds of metres of aluminium pipe stretching the width of paddocks cleared of trees and windbreaks and all obstruction. Within the city, average water use is calculated at around 450 litres per person per day, peaking in January and February to 1000 litres per day as people attend to watering their gardens. In those same dry summer months, the province’s largest dairy farm, irrigating approximately 300 hectares at 150 litres per second, uses approximately 12,960 cubic metres of water per day.
In the province as a whole, over a twelve month period the daily average of surface water directed to irrigation is estimated to be around 2,160,000 cubic metres, while a further 6,652,800 cubic metres of water is drawn from the aquifers that flow beneath the plains, those dark sisters of the Waimakariri, the Rakaia and the Rangitata, which are named more prosaically Aquifers A, B, C, D or E. The evidence is clear upon the surface where the rivers of the province are shrinking or have dried completely to dusty channels.
To maintain a steady supply, in 2003 a trust was formed to explore the possibility of constructing a reservoir, along with a 56 kilometre canal, tunnels, headraces and embankments designed to divert the water from the big braided rivers to the dairy farms. The proposal met with opposition from the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, the Fish and Game Council, recr
eational groups such as kayakers, individual farmers faced with losing their land to development, and some of the fourteen people elected to the council of ECan in 2007.
So four months before the quake, the government simply sacked them. It disestablished the council, replaced it with seven commissioners of its choosing and granted them the power to govern for three years. At that point, the government promised, public elections would be reinstated. (When that deadline arrived in 2013, the government simply waved its autocratic wand and extended the commissioners’ period of direct control for another three years.)
This quake occurred, in other words, in a context where central government had a ready appetite for direct managerial control. This, in a country that was already noted as the most centralised in the OECD, barring city states such as Singapore. In 2010, only around 10 per cent of public expenditure in New Zealand was made by local government. Back in 1931, the figure was very different. Then it was closer to 50 per cent.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 6
