Gary McCormick: Sometimes the task we face seems too hard

Gary McCormick. Photo / Supplied

Opinion

They told us how the quake hit them and their families. Now, five Cantabrians tell us how their lives have changed.

This week we talked on More FM to the former Mayor of San Francisco about the 1989 earthquake. Many people were killed in the quake, which caused billions of dollars of damage.

I asked Art Agnos: "Can you seriously say to me that San Francisco is now a better and more positive place after the '89 quake?"

Art said that it was. He said San Francisco had made the city a better place.

I live in Lyttelton. My twins, Florence and Bridie, were born 10 days before the February 22 "big quake". They survived because of quick thinking on the part of my mother-in-law.

Nowadays, Simon Barnett and I broadcast out of a caravan at Addington racecourse. My house has shifted on the foundations and will have to be shifted back. I feel seasick, some nights, walking across the floor. Simon's house will have to be destroyed and rebuilt.

I would like to tell you that things have got much better. Dan Carter and Richie McCaw will stay in Canterbury. That is a huge relief - for no apparent reason.

We will stay. Twenty thousand people have left. It crosses our minds that this could be a city which may not be able to go on.

But we have some new, good leaders. And I have my wife Katherine and the twins. The twins will one day know that they lived through a killer earthquake 10 days after they were born.

So I wouldn't want to fool you about how we feel down here. Smart, clever people are just carrying on. Sad, miserable people are carrying bags of excrement to their drop-off points.

We are still shell-shocked and counting the people we know who didn't survive. And the businesses which probably will not survive.

So give us a little time here to reassess our situation.

John Key has said this week's Budget was a Christchurch Budget. Good on him.

But the damage runs deep. The biggest problem we face is the psychological one. We have to convince ourselves that we should continue to believe.

My twins have a huge wooden structure built around their cot. Every time a shake happens, I grab Katherine and say "wait".

If we need to sprint across the room, after a certain period of time, we do.

All of us in Canterbury appreciate the money and the resources coming from Auckland and the rest of the world. For the time being, we are are sitting here, waiting ...