February 22nd 2011

At 12:50 on Tuesday February 22nd I was waiting on the corner of Colombo and Armagh Streets to go in to a meeting with the Hays Recruitment Company in the Forsyth Barr building. My appointment was at 13:00 so as I was early I just waited on the street. Whilst the Forsyth Barr building survived the quake, the internal stairwell collapsed and most people had to be rescued by crane, whilst a few abseiled to safety.

When the earthquake struck the first jolt didn't seem to be that bad, but part of me registered that it must be a reasonably strong aftershock to be felt outside. I looked around and found a strong looking pillar near to me which I knelt down in a ball next to and waited for it to stop. The shaking didn't seem to go on for too long, but was very intense. Most of the damage seemed to happen in the last few seconds, when big blocks starting falling down off of the building opposite me and then finally Colombo Street was ripped open, like someone tearing a piece of paper.

When I got up there was nobody obviously injured in sight, but it was impossible to see very far - a huge cloud of dust had enveloped the city and I couldn't even see one block in any direction. There was a person lying in the street opposite me who I thought was hurt, but then they got up and wondered off so I guess they were just lying there. A women came running out of the bank and was hugging me, crying, but she was OK and wondered off. We were told to get away from the parapets, and not knowing where to go I went to Victoria Park.

I tried calling Carol, but the network was jammed, but I managed to send a txt and she replied very quickly. Whilst sat in Victoria Park, which had filled with all the other shell shocked people the aftershocks had already started. I decided to return to work along the river which had less tall buildings close to it.

The road over the Armagh St bridge was pretty stuffed with foot high pieces of tarmac thrust together. Already there was some flooding from the liquefaction coming up from underground and the Avon River had the colour of glacial till.

A huge amount of glass had been blown out of the high rise office blocks on the corner covering the streets in shards of broken glass. Despite the complete power outage there were sirens and alarms going off everywhere.

The stone building at the corner of Gloucester Street and Durham Street had been reduced to a pile of rubble. At Hereford Street I was briefly tempted to walk down to Cathedral Square, which I could just see appearing out of the dust, but I quickly thought better of it and carried on heading back to work.

My neighbour spotted me as I was running past the Boat Shed Café. She was alright but said the inside of the Boat Shed was trashed. We were outside of the building for the first big aftershock which was quite substantial and I instinctively grabbed the bike rack for reassurance. She was worried about her dog, which would have been home by it's self at the time. (When Carol got home she found the dog had gone but luckily it turned up in the pound a week or so later to great relief)

The foot bridge across the Avon was the last obstacle to cross before getting back to the hospital. This was damaged at both ends too. I met up with my colleagues who had evacuated to outside of the office after the quake. Even here there was some liquefaction. Despite the damage to the office, they only began to get a full picture of the devastation in the city centre when those who had been there returned. It was such a great moment when we knew that everybody was back safely. We sat in a colleague's car for a short while and listened to the early news reports, which were brief and contradictory. They reported the collapse of the cathedral (true) and the aircraft control tower at Christchurch International Airport (turned out to be not true). The hospital was reported as completely evacuated and not functioning, which was definitely misinformed.

We went to check the computer rooms, which involved walking past the emergency department, where casualties were already arriving, in ambulances, in cars and in trucks. I didn't look.

In the hospital Parkside East building, there was surface flooding in the basement and a large number of the heavy ceiling tiles had fallen down. The basement looked to be evacuated and we seemed to be the only ones in there. Without going in to the technical details I spent the next two hours between the two computer rooms fixing the systems that had failed during the shaking. Some colleagues stayed and some went. The systems had been remarkably resilient, but a power blip had caused some to reboot in the wrong order. As we worked to fix them, there was aftershock after aftershock. The computer room in the basement was bad because it felt like a tomb, the computer room in the Labs building shock violently at every aftershock and I dived for the door each time. The stairway in that building had extensive cracking and eventually had to be propped up.

We were in Parkside building again when the generator failed and we were left standing in the dark. That was enough - we made our way by the light from our mobile phones and headed back to our office, whilst the hospital speaker system sprung in to life and was telling doctors to prepare to receive mass casualties. Back in our office structurally there was some cracking in the stairwell but otherwise the building seemed sound. Everything inside was in total disarray - boxes, partitions, shelves and cabinets everywhere. We hung around for a bit whilst the power was restored to the hospital buildings and then it was time to head home.

I walked the 11km home with a colleague from work. The journey took two hours and was completely surreal. We walked down through the South City Mall car park which had turned in to a cracked cess pit of mud. Next to it, the top two stories of the Smiths City multi storey car park had crumbled in to the lowest level. Helicopters were carrying out water drops on a burning building (we didn't know it at the time but this was the CTV building). Everywhere there were people on foot leaving the city. Heading down Page's Road with a mass exodus of people we saw cars that were stuck in huge sink holes which had swallowed half of them. The roads were completely gridlocked, full of cracks and covered in silt. House after house had obvious damage - holes in the roofs, brick walls down and some had completely come off of their foundations. People were putting up tents on any dry patch of ground they could find. We passed two young girls carrying a baby wrapped in only a blanket trying to walk 7km back to Parklands. To get back to New Brighton we had to wade through water up to our knees for several hundred metres around the ring road junction. Abandoned cars were floating in it. The New Brighton bridge was stuffed. The electricity sub station had sunk a metre and a half in to the ground. Only when we got in to New Brighton itself did the liquefaction stop. I returned to a house, which despite Carol cleaning for three hours was in a complete mess, with stuff, broken glass and cooking oil spread everywhere. The chimney had crashed through the veranda roof and was cracked through the base with a 2cm crack, which had split bricks in two. The whole house had moved sideways 1/2'' on the foundations and was no longer level. Along with the rest of Christchurch we were now living in the dark ages: No power, phone, internet or sewage system and a mobile network that lasted for no more than another hour.