Tim McNamara

Christchurch - A personal overview of 5 March 2011

Morning

The day started with a delayed flight. I wasn’t sure whether that was an omen for things to come. However, the flight itself was great. I was given great service from Air New Zealand staff, a wonderful seat and because I was on a smaller, slower, lower-flying plane (that had been put on to deal with the extra capacity), I had some time to take in the wonder of the South Island’s landscape.

As I drove into the city from the airport, it was difficult to tell that anything significant had happened. There seemed to be a few road works, as per normal in a big city. The memorable first signs of damage were in Hagley Park. Large mounds of grey material seemed to be plotted like hay bails over the grass. Then I came accross my first broken bridge. Then my first army LAV. Then it struck me.

Guided Tour

The day proper began with a guided tour from Julian Carver. Our travels took us to the eastern suburbs and concluded with a trip to the closed New Brighton Pier. We remained off roads that had notices asking for ‘residents’ vehicles only’, however there was still plenty to be seen.

Julian took me to his Quaker Meeting house. It was the first time that he had seen the damage to his place of worship. Suffice to say, the liquefaction had bubbled its way through the concrete foundations and had destroyed the interior of the building. As well as being deeply troubling to both of is, it answered an important question for me.

The houses in Aranui and surrounds are still standing. Only commercial structures, such as the corner dairy, tend to be broken. However, just because the houses are still there, looking intact, does not mean that the families are okay. It’s very likely that the the inside of everyone’s house is filled with grey, insiduous silt.

In many ways, this is worse. The liquefaction has probably burst all of the pipes and electricity lines, yet it’s very difficult to visually detect the damage.

One thing that upset me was the placement of one of the portable toilets. It was in the middle of a flooded area of grass. So, in order to go to the toilet, it was necessary to walk over about 5m of standing water. wtf.

There were many sparkles though. I saw two lots of BBQs offering free sausages. There was a bouncy castle in one of the parks. My impression is that the officials understand the problem, but they don’t have the capacity to help where they can. I think that’s why BBQs offering people free sausages are so fantastically genuine. No official will ever organise that. However, that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes people smile. I hope that community-sourced energy will be harnessed by the CDEM authorities.

Here are some things that I noticed, that I don’t think have been reported on significantly by the media.

• most main roads are passable
• however, no one is handing out maps of the cordons or detours
• side-roads have large piles of silt as car parks outside people’s houses
• manholes have popped up about foot off the ground
• I found myself becoming reliant on the cones when driving at night, which really wasn’t a good idea

Contacts made

Late afternoon was spent engaging contacts for the rest of the week’s proceedings.

• Anthony Baxter from Google. Hopefully, we’ll be working together to conenct with the city’s ICT crowd. They certainly have greater clout than me at the moment.
• Mitch from ECan. If you don’t know who Mitch is, he’s the head of Environment Canterbury’s emergency management function.
• Steve Davis, from the NZ Red Cross’s ICT sector.

I also talked to Leanne Gibson, the CIO of the Ministry of Education. She’s still in Wellington, but seems very impressed with the eq.org.nz project.

Early evening

I then went to a Riccarton supermarket to get a few provisions for the week. For some reason, I was expecting things to be different in there than a supermarket at home. I felt a reassuring nothingness while I was in there. Being inside that supermarket was just the same as any unfamilar supermarket. You didn’t quite know where things were, but you knew they would be there.

Late evening

After dinner, I did something that I deliberated over for about an hour. I travelled to Sumner, via Redcliffs. The situation there is bad. It feels surreal driving through suburbia without street lighting. The roads over that way are pretty terrible. There has been lots of damage to the cliffs.

There are fewer cones out that way, so my rental car felt the brunt of one or two raised manholes.

There were no checkpoints, however there were several police vehicles. There were two buildings in Sumner that appeared to have lighting. A bar had neon lights going and the local fire brigade seemed to be bustling with activity.

Personal impact

The extent of the cordon was astonishing. The outer cordon is several blocks away from the city. It is staffed by many bored privates on sentry duty. This cordon would be really easy to breach last night. Most of the staff are lazily sitting on deck chairs or hunkered in LAVs. The only pair of sentries that appeared to be vigilant last night were two that were exposed to the elements.

I haven’t seen the inner cordon. I am sure that it is intimidating. However, New Zealand personnel appear to be untrained and illdisciplined for being sentries. From what I recall of sentries in London, Rome and a few other places, they craft their faces into guard-dog steel. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the New Zealand staff. They seem bored and disinterested.

I am concerned that the water distribution places lots of burden on to the people collecting water. I feel for the immobile, Water tankers, which appear to be reconditioned milk tankers for rail, are taking up car parks around the city. They are not staffed, so I assume that people are being left to their own devices. However, it strikes me as a herculean task to expect an elderly person to carry a 20l Jerry can back to their home each day. Moreover, I dread to think of the people that may have died in their homes without being checked.

Arriving in a well-kept motel room with water, sewerage and power was a strange feeling. I felt guilty that I could use these facilities with such ease. I hope that this week will be an opportunity for me to provide those services to more people.

Final thoughts

One of the things that I noticed with the damage as I drove through was how horribly inequal the situation is. This is the first time I’ve seen in a non-academic manner, how disasters affect the poorest the hardest.

The media are talking about not having sufficient portable toilets. However, that’s only one of the problems. That should be compounded with the fact that petrol stations have had their tanks lifted out of the ground, the corner dairy is closed and the supermarkets are so badly damaged that they will never reopen. It’s much harder for people in the poorest people to access supplies each day. Their roads are the worst and their streets are the dustiest. This is bound to mean that the trip is slower and health needs will be greater.

This is so different to the rest of the city. I went to Riccarton Mall yesterday. There are many more signs saying “We (heart) Chch” on Wellington’s Cuba Street than here.

This morning I found out that the National Controller hasn’t visited the worst-affected suburbs. A slight tinge of disgust doused in dismay came over me. I didn’t like that was able to beat him for a first-hand look at the area.