Paul Holmes: A city battered but not bowed

The earth opens in Courtenay Drive. Photo / Herald on Sunday

Well, I needed to write about Christchurch this week. I hadn't been there, and I couldn't write about it if I hadn't, so I went down on Friday to see things for myself.

Sometimes there's nothing like seeing things for yourself. I hoped people wouldn't mind my showing up. And they didn't. Which was lovely. People wanted to talk. They wanted to talk their heads off. It's like talking is part of leaving it behind.

Pam, our Christchurch photographer, meets me at the airport and we head to Kaiapoi.

Even last Saturday morning as the extent of the quake was unfolding it was obvious from what people were telling us that Kaiapoi had been badly hit. We drive for miles. No damage whatsoever. One pile of that wet, grey sand on the side of the highway. Nothing more. We drive into Kaiapoi. It seems fine.

Then we turn into a cordoned off street, Courtenay Drive. The destruction is huge. Up a long driveway two houses have been lifted and shoved on an angle. Their joinery is torn apart. Concrete has moved a metre or so away from the base of the houses. There has been a violent ripping. The houses are abandoned. Just left. New houses abandoned by their owners. Portaloos on the street.

Over the road, a woman whose property is also torn is loading boxes from her pantry into her car. Diane Pearce says she's over it. She's leaving. She isn't coming back. Her son has built a retirement village in Rangiora, I think she told me, and she is moving in there. Diane's driveway of great concrete slabs has shifted and the slabs have moved apart. She says it's got worse as the week has gone on. Her house is condemned.

Diane's son Jed and daughter-in-law Kareen arrive with their kids. Jed points to the road in continued disbelief.

Jed tells me there was a 60cm layer of sand across the street and along the street. The liquefaction, he says. But where from, I ask. God knows, he says. It hasn't come out of the lawns. We can see that. He thinks it's come out of the cracks between the concrete gutter, say, and the road tarseal. If so, it must have erupted at incredible pressure. In places you can see the little sand volcanoes. They make a little hill and have a crater in the middle with a deep hole.

House after house is condemned or in need of repair. Portaloos are everywhere. Round the corner, in another part of Kaiapoi, near its lovely old town centre, is a twisted bridge, mangled and broken by an angry giant. Along the river bank is a lovely old rose garden. Its beds are covered in filthy silt. The lads tell me the shock was bloody frightening.

Tony Lamplugh and the team are removing the silt and replacing it with beautiful new topsoil.

Over by the broken bridge, going home with a plastic bag of groceries and her Jack Russell terrier, is Shelley Tapp, who has stunning blue eyes. Shelley says she is a nurse at St George Hospital. On the night shift last Saturday, up on the third floor, they had 11 aftershocks. They had to tear round reassuring the patients, while terrified themselves, no doubt.

Shelley's Jack Russell, Jazz, is scratching its backside by rubbing it along the ground as we speak. Shelley says Jazz woke her up at 4.23 last Saturday morning, 10 minutes before the big quake.

Shelley remembers the sound of a strong wind, followed by that of a freight train. There were a couple of gentle quakes before the big one, she says.

Everywhere you go there are teams of blokes in orange tops. I ask one fellow about this liquefaction. He says water comes up, the house floats and when the water drains the house settles, invariably at a funny angle. Mike is a structural engineer, he says, with a Masters in Seismology. Mike and his team of orange-topped fellows cram into a van and are off.

We drive into town. Again, no damage for miles. But suddenly, you find a street of houses with their chimneys gone, or a house whose concrete walls have twisted and cracked and moved. It is the randomness of the destruction. There is no accounting for it.

Then we're into Avonside Drive, along the river. This is a hugely damaged area. House after house is uplifted, twisted and condemned. Driveways broken, lawns with great canyons in them. On the street, broken, torn tarseal and the ubiquitous remains of the silt, the liquefaction that has become the word of the Christchurch earthquake.

Dave Bainbridge from Hirepool is connecting big industrial hoses. They will have to drain some of the filthy, sewage-polluted stormdrains into the river. Dave says people are getting tired. In the first couple of days the driving in Christchurch was super nice. In the past couple of days, he says, people aren't giving way to the right, that kind of thing. Three months ago, Dave's wife made him go out and get earthquake emergency kits for their house.

Into the inner city. Serious parts of it have had a thrashing. Major buildings are down or damaged. Some look unscathed but have been abandoned. The big high-rise Radio Network building looks fine but is empty.

Friendly police and young soldiers man the barricades round the CBD. And this is my main impression of the day, friendly people doing their best. People are kind and nice and they call out greetings to us.

Then it is round to see mayor Bob Parker. Bob and I have known each other for more than 30 years. His HQ is not the flash new council building because, at the moment, that's developed a few little glitches. Instead the HQ is the nearby, large and beautifully designed Christchurch Arts Centre. You walk into the ground floor and the place is a hive, alive with people in different-coloured jackets, people in the various services - police, fire, emergency workers, St John Ambulance, no doubt, Civil Defence volunteers. Everyone.

The place is humming.

Sitting halfway down the room on a plain black visitors' couch with a whole lot of papers on one side of him is Bob. Bob tells me to go and get some mash down the end. The mash is delicious, he says. I get some mash and some beef. They are delicious.

Bob sits back on the couch. I'm holding my paper plate. Bob says: "Sit next to Jo." I had already noticed her, this striking woman, but had not put it together. She is beautiful, charismatic. Jo is Bob's wife. She is pure presence.

Bob says last Saturday morning they were both up. They sleep light and get up early, apparently. Jo was downstairs making a cup of tea. Bob was putting his jeans on. The first shock struck. "Shit, I was scared." Bob says the first shock was sharp, savage, prolonged. He says there were no round edges. It was cold steel. He says it was like a doodlebug. Or like a Hercules taking off next to your house. He says it wouldn't go away. He understands it lasted 40 seconds, but it felt much longer. It occurs to me this is the best description of the quake I've heard all week.

Jo tells me that to get off their property they had to prise the electric gates open. The gates were dead.

He was just sitting there, Bob, talking to me, talking to others, taking the odd call. Nothing grand. Tired but relaxed. He has to take a call from Damian at the ABC in Australia. I wave goodbye. Bob's busy. Bob's talking to the world. Bob's in by 5.30 in the morning at the moment, home about 10 at night.

I found his headquarters easy-going. I found the friendly and helpful feeling there to be thoroughly decent and good.

As I left, I thought of Diane and Jed, of Tony doing the roses, of Shelley the South African nurse and her little dog, of Dave with the hose on Avonside Drive and I thought how well Bob has done this week and I hoped they're all going to be all right.