'I was lucky' says worst-hit quake victim

A man struck by a collapsing chimney in the Canterbury earthquake says his chances of survival were 50-50 as rescuers fought to free him.

Simon Robinson, 55, felt his bones breaking when the chimney fell through the ceiling of his Merivale home as he was thrown from his bed by last month's 7.1 magnitude earthquake.

"I made a couple of paces to the door jam with the house doing noodles really, and then the bloody chimney came through the roof and completely buried me under the rubble," he told Prime News.

Nobody died in the earthquake, but Mr Robinson was the worst-injured person.

"It's just one of those things," he said. "One minute you're asleep, the next you're under six feet of rubble."

"As the tiles came down I could feel my lip being ripped off. I could feel my leg being snapped in half. I went down in a very uncomfortable way, so that's why I broke my shoulders and everything. I thought I would be okay as long as I didn't panic.

"So yeah, I thought I was in a bit of strife, but I didn't think I was going to die. I thought 'this is a bit uncomfortable, I've got bloody bricks all over me'. So I tried to lift up, but the only thing that moved were the broken bones."

Mr Robinson is now recovering from his lip injury, amputation of toes on his right foot, a punctured lung, and breaks to his ribs, right eye socket, shoulders, and left hip, femur, ankle and toes.

Mr Robinson has hailed the bravery of his wife Debbie and neighbours, who dug him out. It took up to three people at a time to lift some of the bricks that had not broken.

"I think I've been very lucky, from what I can gather from our two wonderful doctor neighbours, and wives and their wonderful teenage children who helped me enormously - who were heroes, you know. The house is moving, bits of roof are falling in, they're strapping me in. I've got a golf club in the corner of the room - they're tourniqueting the leg that snapped early on. From what I can gather it was 50-50. It could have gone either way, could have gone pear-shaped very quickly, very easily, with that amount of trauma."

Bill Kennedy, one of the neighbours who rescued Mr Robinson, told the Herald it was nice to be labelled a hero, but "it's something you would hope that anyone would do in the same circumstances."

Mr Robinson had shown himself to be just as brave, by never once complaining about his plight, Dr Kennedy said.