Marsden is Here

Watching earthquake scientist guy Mark Quigley on Campbell Live, the look of defeat in his face as he was interviewed outside his house in Avonside, I felt sad. The poor bastard so wanted to say it would get better now, and he just couldn’t say that.

It’s almost like the city is battling with a potentially life threatening illness, with slow progress of therapy and sudden disastrous reversals, as well as the underlying and constant malaise.

A call from a psych trauma specialist friend in the US this morning (just who we needed to hear from). He says that this is an unprecented natural disaster in that three have happened in a short time along with the 6800 or so aftershocks. The first we we all unprepared for; the second we were in training and could dust ourselves off and do it all again.

This time he correctly surmised (in my case and from talking to others here) that many people will be feeling powerless and that picking up the pieces is futile and more will leave. It’s apparently a recognised psychological stage called Repetitive Crisis something (I can’t remember the last word but you get what I mean).

Also... the students? Are in the middle of exams. They'll not be digging us out in a hurry this time round. And dear gods, how TIRED they must be. This is the time when we need outside help coming in.

As I wrote at the time, it became clear to me that what happens on the “good” side of the fence is as important – or in some ways more important – than what happens in the red zone itself. If people clear out, the area dies. It’s not hard to extrapolate that to the city itself.

Life will never be the new normal. It is irretrievably different, on the physical, mental, and emotional planes. Bugger rebuilding, let's talk about building a city anew; probably in the same place but in a head-space sense.

My perception is that the final hurdle is getting consistency across the insurers – no easy task.

EQC alone has 40 reinsurers. Each of them has subsequent reinsurers. Cats to be herded. A phenomenal challenge for the world’s largest ever insurance event. (After the May 23rd deadline passed, EQC had received 344,364 claims, with 510,000 individual claims in that. Those numbers are far higher than Hurricane Katrina, higher than lowly insured Japan.)
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On that scale issue, I have now heard repeated comments that Art Agnos who was mayor of San Francisco during their terrible quake was astonished at the enormity of ours. Theirs was confined to a relatively small area. Ours is huge.
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It’s likely too that we will be a monitored as a case study of how a community rebuilds after an event which is so big and so transformational. With every week that passes, it is clearer than before that we are not talking about picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, being the same and doing the same things. Our community and our city is undergoing a metamorphosis which is physical, human, psychological. None of us individually or as a collective will ever be the same again.
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We have to completely replace about 300km of our sewer network. We have to repair 600km of roading network and replace more besides. Add into that our water and stormwater damage and with the Crown’s help we will be spending $500million per annum for five years. That is ten times what the CCC normally spends on capital expenditure. It is enormous.
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We saw charts which indicated the city’s land has moved permanently, both up and down. The Port Hills have gone up, the rest of the city has gone down. It has spun clockwise to varying degrees right across the city. The estuary has moved upwards as much as two metres. It’s shallower. At some point we will have to make a call about how to handle that.

There is no mistaking the importance the internet will play in crafting our next plan – and I am all too conscious that it favours the white, the wealthy, the well educated, the young.

If you have the misfortune to experience a major earthquake, and the great good fortune to live through it, you will know that there is no warning, no gradual build-up, no time to plan or prepare or even think. You will know that the violence is immediate. Last time the quake came across the plains like a thief in the night, like a band of raiders in a cloud of dust, vast and powerful and inexorable like a great ship in drydock let slip from failed moorings. It was a clear cold night in September, and the sky was powdered with stars. We stumbled around afterwards for many hours as if in a dream, one of those terrible phantoms of the subconscious whose invisible bonds you struggle to wake from. Real life started again with the dawn. This time the quake came in broad daylight with the numbing certainty of a car crash. The sun was shining. The TV was on. My daughter had a spoon to her mouth. She was laughing. I was wrestling with a paragraph. And then time slowed, as the ground accelerated beyond the pull of gravity.