But should your home have suffered greater damage, in excess of $100,000, the ‘cap’ — and 25,000 houses in Christchurch fell into that category — you would receive the EQC payout and must then negotiate with your own insurer for the additional cost to rebuild or repair.
Out in the suburbs it was, as Gerry Brownlee, the minister responsible for EQC, put it, ‘all over to the insurers’.
FOR A SECOND, AS THE entire city is flung into the air, there is unison. Then we fall back to Earth and the map smashes into a hundred tiny pieces. Lines of fracture, long forgotten or ignored, break open. Stresses and tensions rip across the fabric. Everything collapses like a firewall disintegrating into a mound of bricks.
A major faultline opens between the suburbs and the central city. In the central city, it is not ‘all over to the insurers’. Instead of multiple small negotiations, there is a highly centralised, monolithic approach, directly managed by national government.
In the central city, following that fragile early morning in September 2010, the city council had turned to repair. Buildings were boarded up, cracked windows taped. The assessors made their visits and the CBD patched itself up like someone who has been mugged in a dark alley. Ambitions were modest. That wall could be taken down, that hole in the roof repaired, businesses could file their insurance claims, mend what they could and get back to work.
But after the more devastating and damaging quake in February 2011, central government intervened and the city was driven toward a more dramatic response.
A matter of days after the quake, the government established a new entity, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority — or CERA, with a soft ‘c’ like ‘cereal’ — to oversee recovery. The Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 granted CERA wide-ranging powers, including the ability to suspend existing laws and regulations for the purpose of earthquake recovery. Its minister, Gerry Brownlee, received greater authority than any government minister in New Zealand’s history, including in time of war. The CERA legislation was criticised by constitutional experts as ‘setting a dangerous precedent’ but it came into immediate effect.
In the cast of characters in the drama of this city’s recovery, Gerry Brownlee is the chubby wisecracker: former woodwork teacher at a local high school and, according to the profile published in the daily paper, something of an amateur singer. He once came third in a talent contest at a local hotel singing country and western standards. His duo got beaten by a female band. ‘We were singing in G major,’ cracked Gerry. ‘But they played in G string!’
To act as CEO of CERA, the minister appoints Roger Sutton, former head of an electricity company. CERA takes over a tower block, right next door to the city council offices on Worcester Boulevard. In the newspaper profiles, he is the fit and floppy-haired, bicycle-riding White Knight. He enjoys pointing out, evidently, that his office is the highest in the city. Higher than the mayor’s. Higher than anybody’s.
The two towers stand side by side, the council’s tower exposed to public scrutiny, sometimes fiercely critical, through its glass façade, CERA more secretive. You wouldn’t even know they have arrived in the city. There’s no sign at all at street level. You have to go inside a foyer, past a café to the lifts before they announce their presence, up there overlooking the grid. The two towers divide responsibility for reconstruction between them.
According to the brief outline supplied by CERA to a public who might be a little uncertain of their respective roles, the city council will take the lead in planning reconstruction. It will issue building consents. It will handle repairs to the suburban centres. It will deal with properties affected by the particular geotechnical difficulties of collapse and falling stone on the Port Hills. And it will attend to repairs required for infrastructure — all those kilometres of pipes and roads.
In the anonymous tower next door, CERA’s role is more loosely defined. It will ‘co-ordinate and lead the recovery of greater Christchurch’ and ensure ‘the well-being of its residents’. It will work with a wide range of organisations to ‘help restore its economic, cultural and environmental well-being’.
CERA also has some more specific tasks. It will, for example, assume responsibility for those parts of the city now defined as Red Zones.
THE CITY HAS A NEW MAP. There is another way of understanding its component parts.
Following the quakes, EQC’s rapid assessment teams gathered data concerning land damage throughout the urban area and in the smaller coastal settlements immediately to the north that had also been profoundly shaken. They measured and surveyed and recorded the cracks that had opened along riverbanks, the depth of silt that had bubbled up from below ground, the rock falls on the Port Hills and the sideways spread and slumping of roads.
On the basis of these assessments, the city is divided into four colour-coded residential zones: Green, Orange, Red and White.
In the Green Zone, damage is minimal, the Orange Zone requires further geotechnical assessment, the White Zone is yet to be surveyed, but the Red Zone is in serious trouble. These areas are profoundly damaged. On flat land, there is a high risk of further damage from flooding; on the Port Hills, the risk is rock fall as boulders loosened by thousands of aftershocks threaten to tumble down the steep slopes and cliff faces composed of solidified ash crumble. In the Red Zone, the infrastructure delivering sewage, water or power has been so compromised that it requires rebuilding or prolonged repair, and land remediation is predicted to be difficult to engineer. Demolition and total clearance appear to be the only option.
Seven thousand, eight hundred and thirty-nine homes lie within the Red Zone. The government will make their owners an offer: it will purchase their property — house and land — for a price related to its 2007 government valuation. Or it could agree to purchase just the land, leaving the homeowner to negotiate with their private insurer for the payout for their house. Should the homeowner decline both offers, under section 53 of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act the chief executive of CERA has the power to acquire the property compulsorily in the name of the Crown.
CERA’s major focus, however, does not seem to be suburban, but rather, the central city: the CBD, the grid of streets devised by Joseph Thomas, which, in a completely unanticipated reversal, has become a no-go area cordoned off from the public by wire fences and entry posts manned by army and police. Here, in the central city Red Zone, CERA’s attention is directed to ‘enabling business recovery’ in a ‘sustainable, market-led rebuild’.
And to do this, they need a new map.
TWO WEEKS AFTER THE FEBRUARY quake, Gerry Brownlee announces his priorities in the central city. ‘My absolutely strong position is that the old dungers, no matter what their connection, are going under the hammer … Old stuff, if it’s got any damage at all, needs to be got down and got out, because it’s dangerous and we don’t need it.’
No death is preferable to any other, but the fact is that most of those who were killed — 133 of 185 — died beneath relatively new concrete slab. Nevertheless, with that kind of encouragement, 220 of the central city’s heritage buildings — 40 per cent of the total listed as significant — come down. In total, 900 buildings — 70 per cent of the CBD — fall as 150 or so demolition companies swing into action. Captain Thomas’s grid becomes a percussive place as the drills and excavators, the bulldozers and hydraulic shears, go to work.
CERA has entrusted the management of the ‘getting down and getting out’ of the buildings in the CBD to a former accountant, Warwick Isaacs. In the newspaper profiles, he is ‘the practical Kiwi bloke’, the man who, for relaxation, likes nothing better than to head out to his garage in Rolleston to strip down a Mini. Formerly chief executive of Timaru’s district council, he arrived in the city after the quakes as chair of Canterbury Civil Defence and was then recruited to oversee the government’s ‘deconstruction programme’. His task, as he sees it, is ‘to create empty spaces’.
There’s a peculiar machismo associated with destructio
n, a kind of swaggering excitement. It’s most evident when, in August 2012, a twenty-five-year-old building on Worcester Street, Radio Network House, is demolished by controlled implosion. It’s a technique never previously employed in New Zealand. The building will be stripped out, its support columns will be filled with explosives and on detonation the whole structure will collapse in on itself.
CERA holds a news conference to announce the event in advance. The building will be demolished by an American company CERA describes as ‘the rockstars of demolition’: a company ‘holding the world record for the tallest and biggest exploding demolitions’. They will pack 60 kilograms of explosives into the fourteen-storey building and it will come down — all 6500 tonnes of it, the weight of six jumbo jets — in just seven seconds. The owner of the building compares himself to Christopher Columbus, wanting to set sail when everyone around is saying it can’t be done.
The event is set for dawn on 5 August. CERA anticipates thousands coming to watch, camped out in Latimer Square for front-row seats. The demolition contractors put the right to press the button up for auction on TradeMe. They hope it will raise $20,000 for charity. The top bid of $26,000 is from a consortium of demolition contractors working in the city who give the right to choose who will push the button to the Child Cancer Foundation. The nominee is a six-year-old cancer survivor from Queenstown.
Meanwhile, the owners of a nearby property are threatening an injunction. Westende House was the first building to be reconstructed in the central city following the quake, the solitary poster child of what might be achieved by an individual company with sufficient determination and optimism about the CBD’s future. It was rebuilt in just twenty-four weeks in 2014 while the land was shaking repeatedly from aftershocks. It was tenanted by an IT company and a sharebroking firm when all around offices and buildings were boarded up and empty. But it was there: an actual, functioning building in the middle of the shaky CBD — and only 80 metres away from the implosion site. Whether it can withstand the impact of 6500 tonnes collapsing in seven seconds is not at all certain.
Nevertheless, the implosion goes ahead, minus the cheering audience. Health authorities, concerned at the risk of dust inhalation from the vast cloud released on impact, have warned people to stay away. The tower comes down, Westende House survives and the proceeds from the auction are donated not to the Child Cancer Foundation but to the reconstruction of the Isaac Theatre Royal on Gloucester Street. It is not a technique tried again.
WHILE CERA WAS TAKING SHAPE in one tower in 2011, in the tower next door the city council was devising a plan for how Mr Isaacs’s empty spaces might be filled.
In November 2011, they canvassed popular opinion. They asked the city’s inhabitants to ‘share an idea’ of how they would like their city to be rebuilt. Sixty thousand people responded, offering 106,000 ideas. They suggested markets, cycle paths, trams, office blocks of fewer storeys to replace the towers from which workers had had to abseil on that grim day a few months earlier when the lifts were inoperable and the stairwells cracked and there was no way out but the open window and a tenuous rope to safety. They suggested low-rise hotels in the central city, and small shops offering an alternative to the chain stores of the suburban malls. They suggested playgrounds for children. They came up with fantasies of rooftop gardens and fountains.
In December 2011, the council produced a large folder influenced by those ideas. The Draft Central City Recovery Plan for Ministerial Approval was distributed to every library in the city. In text and artist’s impressions it mapped a city where transport policies have been revised: light rail would link the centre to the university, a $406 million proposal the mayor hoped could expand to a $4 billion citywide network. The centre of the city would be composed of pedestrian precincts where the river wound through a shadowy grid of streets, linking past to present in the Papawai Otakaro Project. Exotic trees along its banks would be interplanted with indigenous species, ‘providing a haven for the return of native birds and birdsong to the Central City’. Cycleways and footpaths would link familiar landmark buildings: the hospital, in the south-eastern corner, the law courts, the town hall. The Terrace riverside entertainment area would offer its strip of bars and restaurants.
The minister, however, when presented with the draft plan did not approve, not entirely. Mr Brownlee marked it Could Do Better.
A few months later, in April 2012, he announced a new entity within CERA: the Christchurch City Development Unit (CCDU). Its manager would be Warwick Isaacs, the ‘government’s demolition man’ who, having overseen the creation of all those empty spaces, would now oversee their reoccupation. Isaacs described his role as providing a practical, workable ‘roadmap’ for the delivery of the council’s draft. This roadmap would supply clarity for the central city’s owners and developers, by identifying the location of key projects. Once they were certain, they would flock to the area. He would attract overseas investors too, and their very necessary capital. He would develop a plan — but it would not be the council’s to implement. Local government might initiate the plan, but it was central government that would make the final decisions. It was very simple: ‘At the end of the day, the plan was always going to be the minister’s. [The city council] understand now the role for the minister is to decide what he likes and what he doesn’t.’
Those towers, in other words, stood in competition. This was to be a game of dominance, in which the government woud have the upper hand. The highest office in the city was an accurate metaphor for actual power. Down at street level, the citizens heard the ricochet, the distant rattle of sniper fire as national government undermined local authority, overturned a modest proposal for reconstruction and forced another direction. To create this plan, this roadmap, Isaacs called together a consortium of twelve international and local architects and planners — the Blueprint 100 Team — and charged them with developing a definitive plan that would absorb some of the concepts of the council’s original draft, but improve upon them. And they would have 100 days to do it.
‘ONE HUNDRED DAYS.’
That magical phrase, beloved by presidents and autocrats all the way back to Napoleon. That number which emanates decisiveness and resonates with powerful, purposeful leadership. Though it doesn’t always work out very well. For Napoleon, after all, the 100 days ended with Waterloo.
The process in Christchurch, as described to Press reporter John McCrone by a Blueprint team member, Don Miskell, was classically hectic. Only a week between the call for bids to join the Blueprint consortium and final selection. The shortlist compiled on Saturday, interviews on Monday, second interviews on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, CCDU told the individuals selected to form the team, ‘You start tomorrow.’ The team assembled in such haste included representatives from Christchurch architectural practices, project managers RCP from Auckland, and urban planners, Populous and Woods Bagot from Australia. All top people, experts in their fields. Decisions, said Miskell, ‘got made with confidence. There were no disputes at all.’
Decisions about the city’s redesign were made with the aid of ‘little cardboard cutouts of the anchor projects’, which the team ‘shuffled round a big map until we found how the jigsaw might fit together’. The cutouts, Miskell told the reporter, ‘were very useful’, especially with a ‘tactile’ client like Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee, the ‘ultimate boss of the rebuild’.
‘When we met the minister, we could say, “This is how we’re going. Here’s the options. We’ve got four sites for the sports stadium. The stadium could go here, the convention centre maybe over there.”’
So simple. So streamlined. The efficiencies of absolute power and a clear-felled site.
On 30 July 2012 the blueprint flashes onto the television screen with its precincts and its vision that will inspire the world. I watch the launch on a television in Auckland, the congratulatory applause, the camera lights bouncing off the reflected glow of a room full of men, not a woman in sight. The prime ministe
r gives the plan a ringing endorsement. The city is well on its way, he says, to becoming ‘very much like Melbourne’.
Beyond that room, the world doesn’t seem to be taking much notice. I look for the report of the launch in next morning’s Herald. It doesn’t make the front page, which is taken up with a rates rise for wastewater management, a man accused of grooming a young girl for sex and a ‘female screecher’ who had made life difficult for journalists reporting a basketball match at the London Olympics.
It doesn’t make an appearance till page five, under the headline, ‘Christchurch rebuild to feature sports stadium’. A ‘covered 35,000-seat sports stadium is the showpiece of the rebuild plan’, along with a convention centre in a ‘picture postcard location’ by the Avon. It will take only minutes to walk from the Square to the stadium, through a city that will have, according to Mr Brownlee, ‘a light airy college campus-like feel’.
To make the vision reality, the government will be ‘working with’ around 880 city property owners. Their land can, if necessary, be compulsorily purchased to make way for key proposals. One of the owners, with bars and cafés on the riverside strip now zoned as the centre of an entertainment precinct, is enthusiastic. The blueprint shows the way through ‘previously uncharted waters’.
On the screen it is difficult, amid the dazzle and zoom, to make out the details. They are clearer on the paper version distributed to local libraries. At first sight, the plan looks exactly like the council’s preliminary proposals. It has a similar layout, similar graphics, but on closer examination, there are changes, omissions, deletions, shifts in emphasis.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 8
