Ten years later; some earthquake lessons for a pandemic.
Last Friday, I taught a workshop in the Rehua building at the University of Canterbury; known in a previous life as the Commerce Building. Standing in the atrium, I thought about the time, nearly ten years ago, that at 12.51 there was a sheer stampede to get out from underneath the glass roof, as the ground shook.
I was wearing a summer dress, despite the weather being unseasonably chilly. My recycled green leather jacket (a treasure), was left behind in the chaos — and my slip-on shoes came off as everyone tried to exit in a hurry.
Making our way across campus, after what we thought was ‘just another’ aftershock, it wasn’t until someone yelled “the Cathedral is down” that we began to understand the magnitude of impact in the city centre. Comms were patchy at best and technology was a far cry from what it is today: we stood around in my flat, passing around the one cellphone with Facebook capability, so that we could respectively update our statuses to ‘we’re okay’.
The Student Volunteer Army swung into its largest mobilisation yet and we learned more about response, disaster, and ourselves, than we had prepared for.
As I scanned my QR code into the building on Friday, 19th February 2021, I looked at the remediated building and thought about the (many) years that have followed that tumultuous moment.
Because, what post-quake Christchurch has taught us — better than anything — is that recovery isn’t binary.
There has never a day that we woke up and the city was ‘fixed’; for some people, the battles continue today; the apprehension of that ‘earthquake sound’ remains.
In 2021, as we navigate the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, I’ve been thinking about that ‘recovery’ narrative a lot. Headlines talk about the “post COVID” world; we hold out for “the benefits of the impending Trans-Tasman bubble”; politicians debate lockdowns focused on the economic impacts without always thinking about the people most affected. We hear words like ‘resilience’ thrown around.
Canterbury locals acutely remember these headlines, dressed in different clothes (but with the same ‘re’ words!). “When XYZ project is completed”; “the benefits of the impending return of this service”; school and community decisions made arbitrarily by policy experts.
If there’s one thing that we learnt? Stop promising a completion date for the recovery of a city (which, hilariously, in the early days, was “five years”).
Today, there’s a lot to be proud of across the city. Several so-called ‘anchor projects’ have shown true leadership in terms of having been designed inclusively by and for the community — I’m speaking, of course, of the Margaret Mahy Playground and Tūranga Library. For many, those two spaces have done more to attract people back into the city than all of the rest of the recovery combined.
There are also numerous examples of people who have created their own space and pioneered recovery; the ones who were told by officials that ‘now is not the time to try new ideas’ and who did it anyway.
One of the biggest challenges of post-quake Christchurch was in changing the narrative* about recovery; how do you explain the impacts of living with uncertainty, at every level, to decision-makers not encumbered by that same sense?
The irony is that — ten years later — that same uncertainty is everywhere as we navigate the impacts of COVID-19. As a city, Christchurch has spent a decade navigating earthquakes, a terrorist attack and COVID-19. Not always gracefully or charismatically; sometimes recovery looks gruntier and uglier than the textbooks would have us believe.
I’ve been privileged; I’ve welcomed dignitaries, opened buildings and celebrated the milestone success of recovery moments. I’ve also cried with frustration more times than I can count about the seemingly unjustness of bureaucratic decisions and sat with friends worn down with exhaustion. Whether you’re navigating recovery personally or professionally, it requires a relentless and stubborn optimism — one that feels a bit similar to enduring a pandemic.
Speaking with friends, colleagues and acquaintances overseas, it’s interesting to observe the countries where the population has navigated uncertainty to a large degree before — and how they’re coping with the seemingly endless presence of the virus.
Today, ten years on, it’s a complicated set of emotions. The Erin who went to lunch in Cafe 101 that day in 2011 was planning on following the corporate lawyer pathway (even with the deep-seated sense of dread that that plan evoked). The subsequent change in decisions and direction have been directly attributable to that day and a drastic reprioritisation. Present-day Erin counts herself incredibly lucky to have been able to make those decisions back then.
Because, if there’s one thing that disasters give us (more than they take away), it’s the permission to reset. To re-determine, both individually and collectively, what’s most important to us as the ground shifts beneath our feet.
Ten years on in Christchurch, we’ve learned that some of the best ‘recovery’ frameworks come when we listen; both to ourselves and to our communities. There is a chance for us to learn from Canterbury’s experience — and to honour those lessons as we shift into the (ongoing) recovery of another disaster.
After all that Ōtautahi Christchurch has endured in the past decade, it would be nice to think that we’d use some of what we learnt (and some of what we f*cked up) to help us through the present disaster. Here’s hoping.
** so much so, it spawned the name of our company, Narrative Campaigns.