The Best Teacher
November 2012
Until September 2010, Wellington was the city New Zealanders expected to be hit by a devastating earthquake. In February 2011, those outside Christchurch watched the television news as the horror unfolded, and while Christchurch struggled to get on the road to recovery, the rest of the country did its best to learn lessons from the Christchurch experience. What to do, what not to do.
As bad as the 2010 and 2011 quakes were for Christchurch, a large quake under Wellington would be worse. Roads in and out of mostly-flat Christchurch remained open in spite of the February quake, but that would not be the case for not-so-flat Wellington. Wellington’s main routes in and out went over hills and up valleys and so were likely to be cut off in a quake. Power and water supply would also be interrupted as they tended to follow those main routes in and out of the region. Some suburbs would be cut off, not for days, but for weeks and months. People in those areas wouldn’t have power or water and would be reliant on helicopters and barges for supplies. In short, what had happened in Christchurch following the February quake would be repeated in Wellington, but on a larger scale and for a longer period of time. Wellington needed to learn from the Christchurch experience, build more redundancy and strength into their systems and be prepared. It was a need that was difficult to ignore as long as Christchurch was still fresh in people’s minds.
One mistake Lindsay hoped Wellington would learn from was the CTV building. Buildings needed to be built properly and any issues found needed to be dealt with, not brushed under the carpet as too hard or, worse, as not worth doing because it cost too much. As much as she hadn’t wanted to believe that human failings had led to the building’s collapse, in the end it was undeniably clear that was the case. There were so many mistakes leading to those one hundred and fifteen deaths, and no one had stepped up and taken responsibility for the part they played in the building’s collapse. The engineer who had designed the building didn’t have experience with multi-storey buildings. His boss failed to supervise him properly and then when City Council officials expressed reservations about the design, he pressured them to sign it off. After the September and December 2010 quakes, the council’s inspectors failed to pick up the state of the building. The Royal Commission heard that some people working in the building had felt unsafe after the Boxing Day quake, and some were actively looking for other jobs in order to get out of the building.
Lindsay hated the saying about experience being the best teacher. To her that meant one’s life would be littered with mistake after mistake after mistake. It was best to learn from other people’s mistakes, something she tried to teach her children. But it was a difficult thing to teach children when even adults made short-sighted decisions, postponing upgrading a building because they didn’t want to spend the money, not thinking about the consequences of that building killing people in a large quake. Valuing life more than money, perhaps that’s what she needed to focus on with her children, teaching them to value life and people more than things. But was she teaching by example when so much of her present life was taken up with worrying about when the house would finally be fixed? She constantly felt that she was failing as a parent, not spending enough time just relaxing with Olivia and Jack, leaving it to Alice to be the fun adult in the house. Lindsay tried not to be consumed by worrying about things, tried to remind herself that childhood was short, to enjoy every moment. Look at Alice, after all. Her childhood had passed so quickly, she was twenty now, working full time, and Lindsay struggled to remember where all those years had gone. She tried to learn from that and make the most of these years with Olivia and Jack, but most of the time she was simply too tired.
The second winter in their broken house had passed with more massive power bills, over $400 in June and July, in spite of Lindsay’s efforts to not use the heaters when she was home alone during the day. She was just so cold, sitting in the lounge with the laptop doing Kevin’s paperwork, not moving enough to keep herself warm.
At least the insurance process was going well. The insurance company’s PMO had prepared a scope of works and organised for a geotechnical engineering firm to carry out investigations on the state of the land. The firm had made a series of appointments to carry out the investigations that would be required and the first had been the day before. Lindsay had not known what was involved, otherwise she would have kept Jack home so he could see the rig that they brought onto the section. It was yellow and on caterpillar tracks, with two spiral plates that drilled into the ground. A rod was then forced down into the ground and a series of measurements taken. They had drilled at two spots, one in the backyard and one in the front yard.
Seeing the rig at work would have made up for Jack’s disappointment at not getting the teacher he wanted next year. Julia had been Olivia’s year 2 teacher, and she was one of those teachers who had a way with little kids, could always make them laugh. She never discouraged the kids from asking questions, never became annoyed at the Why? Why? Why? of teaching six-year-olds. She was good at explaining things in a way that made sense to them without being patronising, and this made the children like her and want to be in her classroom. When she told them to do something, they did, because they wanted to please her. A few days ago, Jack had found out that the impending birth of Julia’s first child meant she wouldn’t be teaching next year. She wouldn’t be teaching him. It wasn’t fair, he said. Olivia got to have Julia as her teacher, why couldn’t he?
No, life wasn’t fair, it didn’t always go the way we wanted it to. That was a difficult lesson for children to learn, and Lindsay was glad Jack was starting to learn it over something as trivial as who his teacher would be next year. There were plenty of good teachers at the school, it was unlikely Jack would end up with someone he didn’t like.
Life certainly wasn’t fair for the families of the people who had died in the CTV building. There had been no accountability, no police prosecution, no professional censure for the engineers who worked on the building. Lindsay remembered going into the city for the first time after the February quake. The cordon had been reduced and it was possible to see the remains of the CTV building, its scorched lift shaft standing there like some grim memorial, the space around it utterly bare. It was awful, and Lindsay was relieved to hear it had been demolished. Even now, over a year after the lift shaft demolition, Lindsay tried to avoid that part of the city.
Lindsay was glad Jack and Olivia were too young to understand what it meant that so many people had died and that no one had taken responsibility for what had happened. It was hard enough to bear as an adult.
That night as Lindsay and Kevin were getting ready for bed, she asked him about the CTV building. ‘How do you feel about no one being accountable for the CTV building?’ she asked him.
He had just removed his t-shirt and he paused to look at her before tossing it into the washing basket. ‘Don’t think about it,’ he said, his mouth a grim line that said he did think about it. Was that his answer? Or was he telling her to stop thinking about it? He took off his jeans and socks and tossed them into the basket, grabbed a pair of boxer shorts from the drawer and went through to the bathroom.
Lindsay changed into her pyjamas and tucked herself into bed. She was reading a novel about a missing woman, but she felt she was making little progress, reading the same paragraph over and over again. One day, maybe, she would get back to her old reading habits, ripping through a novel in a few days, instead of weeks. One day when she stopped feeling so tired all the time.
She heard the shower stop, then a few minutes later Kevin came through and climbed into bed. He leaned over to kiss her gently on the cheek and she sniffed the light perfume of soap and shampoo. She looked at him questioningly.
‘I hate it,’ he said, his voice strained, full of emotion. ‘So many people died and they didn’t have to, and no one steps up and takes responsibility.’
Lindsay put her hand over his but said nothing.
‘I ha
te this place,’ he said. ‘I hate what it’s teaching our kids. How are we supposed to teach our kids to take responsibility for their actions when one hundred and fifteen people died and no one answers for it?’
‘We teach them that,’ Lindsay said, ‘we can teach them to do the right thing, even if it seems no one else is.’
‘But we’re fighting against the tide, Lin,’ he said. ‘There’s so many bad jobs being done, people being short-changed, and hardly anyone steps up and takes responsibility.’
‘We’ll go,’ Lindsay said. ‘When the house is sorted, we’ll go somewhere else and we can forget about what’s going on here.’
He nodded. ‘That would be good.’
185 Chairs
December 2012
In the suburb of Riccarton west of the central city, it was easy to forget there had been earthquakes, especially if you were on the stretch of Riccarton Road near the busy Westfield Mall. Cars were pulling in and out of the mall carpark and people were walking along the streets and going in and out of the mall. Further along Riccarton Road towards the city, there were gaps where buildings had been demolished, but that wasn’t the case around the mall, and Alice could understand why Emma had chosen to stay in Riccarton, if she was dreading seeing the city as much as she had said in her messages.
Although Emma’s parents’ house had been badly damaged in the September and February quakes, it was still liveable. In the June 2011 quakes, though, its brick walls had finally collapsed, exposing the inner rooms to the outside and sending her parents out to Rangiora to live with family. Emma decided at that point that she’d had enough of earthquakes and had moved to Australia. In Melbourne, she had met Dave, and now, a year and a half after she had last been in Christchurch, she had brought Dave home to meet her family and to see the city she grew up in.
Her parents didn’t know she was back yet. She wanted a couple of days on her own to adjust, she said, and she and Dave were staying at a motel.
The complete destruction of her parents’ house, although distressing, had the advantage that there was no arguing over what needed to happen to the place. It was clearly uneconomic to repair and was one of the first rebuilds in the neighbourhood. Over winter and spring, Alice had watched the construction of the new place. She had run past it each morning, watching it slowly take shape, the old house demolished and the site prepped, the foundation being marked out and then poured, the framing going up, the roof going on. That experience contrasted with what she was seeing in the city. Instead of coming down slowly, piece by piece, this house was going up, emerging from the ground, and Alice felt a thrill watching its progress. It said there was a future for the city, something beyond devastation and demolition. She would have felt that thrill even if she didn’t know the family who would be moving back in, and she looked forward to the day when it was her own family going back into their repaired home. She wouldn’t be moving back in with them, of course, that was her mental deadline for leaving home, when Kevin and Lindsay packed up and moved out for repairs. Their insurance company had put together a scope of works and Kevin and Lindsay had a meeting with a project manager scheduled in a few weeks, which meant their repair would probably get underway sometime in the new year.
‘Your parents’ house looks great,’ Alice told Emma. They had met for brunch at a café near the mall. ‘From what I’ve seen of the outside. How are they feeling about it?’ They had moved back in two weeks earlier.
‘Really happy,’ Emma said. Their coffees arrived and they ordered their meals.
‘We’ll stay with them from tomorrow,’ Dave said. ‘Once Emma’s had a chance to see the city.’ He sounded uncertain, as though he was unconvinced of her reason for not going right to her parents’ place.
‘Dave doesn’t get it,’ Emma said. ‘He’s seen plenty of pictures of the city, but I don’t think he understands...’
‘No I don’t,’ Dave interrupted, frustration in his voice. ‘I know that.’ He shot Emma a look while sipping at his coffee.
Emma just shrugged, scowling. It must be difficult, Alice realised, to explain how you felt about a place that had been irrevocably changed, even to accept for yourself that the place you had known was gone. It was something Alice didn’t know about, she knew without a doubt that the old city was gone, she lived with the reality of it every day. But for Emma, the true state of the place as she had experienced it after the February quake had faded. When she talked to Alice about the city, she talked about the city she had grown up in, she didn’t like to talk about the city as it was now. Alice thought she understood Emma’s hesitation over going home, her parents were back in a new house, the one Emma had grown up in was gone. But they were used to it being gone, she wasn’t.
Their food arrived and tucking into it gave them an excuse to change the topic of conversation. Dave was a software developer, he said, he worked for a website development company. He was the same age as Emma and Alice, and he was from Melbourne, where they were both living now.
‘My parents are kiwis,’ he said. ‘Went over in the eighties.’
‘They ever tempted to come back?’ Alice asked.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘They come back every now and then to see my grandparents, my mum’s parents, but usually they come to us. They like it better in Aussie. Warmer. Have you ever been over?’
‘To the Gold Coast,’ Alice said. ‘With my grandparents when I was eleven. We did the theme parks and Sea World, which was cool.’
‘You should come see Melbourne, it’s a great place.’
‘It is,’ Emma agreed. ‘Christchurch could learn a lot from it.’
‘People have mentioned Melbourne when they’ve talked about the rebuild,’ Alice said. ‘The laneways, things like that. It sounds like they’re going to try to work that sort of thing into the city, and the container mall is a bit different, not your usual New Zealand retail area where you have a row of shops on one side of a street and another row of shops on another. It’s very cool.’
Emma looked unconvinced.
They were finished eating. The waitress came and cleared their plates, asked if they wanted anything else. No, they said. Emma said it was time to go and see the city, but the expression on her face was one of someone facing their execution.
‘C’mon,’ Dave said, putting his arm around her as they walked away from the café. ‘Just do it!’ She shrugged his arm off. No, he didn’t get it, Alice could see. But how could anyone who hadn’t been here?
They walked down to where Alice had left her car in the mall carpark and drove into the city. Alice parked by the Botanic Gardens, it would be a good spot to return to after seeing the city, a part of the city that looked like it always had.
Alice led Emma and David in towards the city, skirting the red zone to Victoria Square. Both were mostly quiet, staring through the fencing to the wrecked sites beyond, Dave asking the occasional question and Emma or Alice giving only brief answers.
Victoria Square had opened only a few weeks earlier, when the cordon shrank to allow access to it. Efforts had been made to restore the gardens in the Square and it looked good, like the city Alice remembered. On the other side of the river, though, the wrecked town hall sat on the riverbank, its fountain stopped, its pebbled concrete walls jutting starkly into the sky. Had it ever looked attractive? She couldn’t remember.
‘Whoa,’ Emma said. She was staring off past the town hall to where the Crowne Plaza hotel used to stand. It had stood twelve stories high diagonally across the northwest corner of Victoria Square. Now blue pallets had been stacked on the site to form much lower walls, to make up a pavilion that would be used for events over the summer months.
‘There used to be a hotel across the end of the Square,’ Emma explained to Dave. She turned to Alice. ‘When did that come down?’
‘Over winter,’ Alice said. ‘Took five or six months, I can’t remember.’
They continued along the river, past the PGC building site, where eighteen people had died. Ali
ce had been across the river from it during the February earthquake, although she said nothing to Emma and David, she didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Is that the CTV building site?’ Emma said.
‘No,’ Alice said, ‘that’s over that way.’ She pointed towards the centre of the city.
‘Is that the one where all the people died?’ David asked.
‘CTV? Yes,’ Alice said. ‘One hundred and fifteen people. The designer didn’t have enough experience with multi-storey buildings and it didn’t meet the Building Code. Shouldn’t have been approved by the City Council. The council was under pressure to approve it, and so they did.’
‘Who was applying pressure?’ David said.
‘The guy who ran the engineering firm,’ Alice said. ‘But it wasn’t just him, it was a whole string of mistakes. The guy who supervised the build wasn’t around enough to do a proper job and then later when people recognised there were flaws, no one did enough to make the building safe.’
‘Is anyone being charged?’ David asked.
‘This is New Zealand,’ Emma said. ‘No one gets held responsible for anything.’ The bitterness filling her voice surprised Alice, Emma had never talked to her about the people who had died or the enquiries into the building collapses, but obviously she had been following them from Australia. ‘Can we get there?’
‘If we keep going this way,’ Alice said. ‘But first, I want to show you something.’ She led them further along the river, past the families of mallard and paradise ducks. There was even a white-faced heron, its blue-grey plumage sleek and lovely as it moved along the riverbed.
They crossed to the other side of the river and stopped on a dry patch of grass. Covering the grass were chairs, office chairs, lounge chairs, dining chairs, wicker chairs and even a beanchair and a wheelchair. All were different, but all were painted the same crisp, clean white. They were laid out in rows, marching across the grass to form a square.
Bleak City Page 25
