Christchurch's Manchester Courts building has now been fully demolished. Photo / Adrienne Rewi
Opinion
As New Zealand prepares to mark the first anniversary of the February 22, 2011 Christchurch earthquake, nzherald.co.nz asked local bloggers to describe how their lives have been affected in the year since. We sought a range of voices to paint a broad picture of how life really is in the shattered city.
Journalist and photographer Adrienne Rewi has blogged extensively on the state of her city since last February's quake. Her writing is detailed and personal, and her photos are sobering reminders of how dramatically the landscape of Christchurch has been altered.
Read Adrienne's blog, Adrienne Rewi Online, and follow her on Twitter: @AdrienneRewi.
First thing in the morning, just after I wake, I lie still and try to remember life before the earthquakes. Often, my thoughts are shunted sideways by another aftershock. There's been over 10,000 of those now, since September 4, 2010 when the 7.1 tore through our lives and changed our
city so irrevocably. And it's a year now, since February 22, 2011 when the 6.3 earthquake compounded that shock and horror.
It has been the most exciting, most unpredictable and most painful year of my life. Exciting because I thrive in a climate of change and unpredictability; and painful because, unwittingly (until three weeks ago), I have spent the last year walking around, hiding under tables, falling over, shovelling silt from the liquefaction, and snow, and unblocking flooded drains with a fractured spine.
The spine is another story. The earthquakes are more insistent, more determined it seems, to unsettle our lives and shift us in ways many of us would never have imagined. Our memories have been tampered with, our visions and hopes have been torn assunder - or at the very least, re-routed. Our homes are no longer the secure nests we could always rely on and in some cases, our livelihoods have been compromised.
Yet for me, on the plus side, it keeps coming back to that excitement, the change, the anticipation, the wonder, the awe, the new possibilities. I quite often find myself thinking about the incomprehensible power of natural forces and how one split second can completely alter your life's course.
