26/1/2012

On Thursday morning I went to Beckenham, a suburb south of Christchurch city centre, to talk to Miriam Fisher, about her experiences of the February earthquake. It was one of the interviews that I had planned to add into the article I was writing about Christchurch. Miriam is a crafter and her husband is a city planner for Christchurch council. She gave me a lot of very interesting information and I think it’s important to relay that here. But I’ll try to be concise and not make it too long.

Anyway, I’ll stop blathering and just get on with it. Miriam grew up in Tauranga, in the North Island, which sits on a fault line and lived in Hawkes Bay, Napier, where they had a devastating earthquake in 1931. She’s married with two boys and has been living in Christchurch for quite a while now. She said “we thought we were safe moving to Christchurch!” This was her experience of the February 22^nd earthquake: “I was at home that day and had just put my two boys down for their midday sleeps.

Your initial thought is, is it a big one and then you realise it’s massive. I ran into the hallway, trying to yell to the boys “drop and cover” like they teach them in kindy during a quake drill. My youngest son was hysterical and I grabbed the two of them and put them under the table. We stayed there for the duration of the aftershocks.” They lost power until late that night and had no water. When the water came back on, they had to boil it.

At the time of the interview, in January 2012, they were still getting regular aftershocks. They were living in another house when the September quake hit. She said “You get to know how your own building reacts to an earthquake, but when you’re in another house, it’s difficult to tell how big the earthquake will be.” Their house is made of wood, so when an earthquake strikes, it’s a different sensation than being in a concrete house. “Wooden houses are more flexible” she said. “They roll with the earthquake.” For a number of years, buildings have had to reach a code standard. But to make buildings completely earthquake proof is financially very expensive.

When I asked her about that extraordinary sense of community spirit there is in the people of Christchurch, she told me about the church that they go to in New Brighton.  For weeks after the earthquake, the church became a distribution centre for the local area. All of the supermarkets were closed so the church was putting food and drink in trucks and driving it out to people who needed it most. There were teams like the Student Volunteer Army who were helping people move out of homes and shoveling liquefaction away. Miriam, herself being a crafter, became a distribution point in Christchurch for handmade quilts and hats from all around the world that were given to Christchurch children.

It was three weeks before her two boys were back at kindergarten. Other schools weren’t back for months and some schools still hadn’t reopened. It was dependent on engineers and boards of trustees being happy with the building being safe to go back to because the land and building had been compromised. A lot of children had been transferred to other schools.

I asked her if she thought people would stay in Christchurch? She said “Different people have had different levels of trauma and it’s understandable if some people wanted to draw a line through it all.” But she didn’t see any reason why the city shouldn’t rebuild. “The exciting thing is that we’re presented with the opportunity to completely clean the slate.” For her husband, “the whole thing in his head” she said, “is that this is for our kids. We see it as a way to reshape Christchurch, make it stronger and be a beacon to the rest of the world in coping with earthquakes.” Miriam has her own blog, with earthquake related posts:http://makeitgiveit.wordpress.com/author/makeitgiveit/ but she told me about another woman, Gillian Weavers, (Mudbird Ceramics) who decided to design a small range of ceramic jewellery from the silt she was surrounded by in her garden, turning something negative into something beautiful.