Picking up the pieces

A year on from Christchurch's February 22, 2011 earthquake, Otago Daily Times features writer Mark Price finds the city is still picking up the pieces.

Once crushed, a modern three-bedroomed home weighs about 15 tonnes and amounts to about five truck-loads.

• Pictures of the quake

This matter-of-fact information was passed on to the Otago Daily Times this week by Christchurch digger driver Craig Bugden.

In the past year, Bugden has knocked down and crushed about 100 houses, at the rate of three a week on average, and has sent off hundreds of truckloads to the Burwood landfill.

Burial costs $220 per tonne.

Bugden, whose own house escaped the worst of the Christchurch earthquakes, is clearing a subdivision built alongside an estuary in Bexley about eight or 10 years ago.

He is in Seabreeze Tce, working his way towards Wetlands Grove.

These are "new" houses of modern materials - concrete slab, brick walls, plasterboard, aluminium window frames, and with roofs of long-run roofing iron or concrete tiles.

Salvage crews have already been through, stripping out plumbing and kitchen fittings and anything else that could be recycled.

But the house next to where Bugden is explaining the demolition process still has doors. He explains that's because the doors are worthless - swollen and bent from being submerged in the silt and water of liquefaction.

The same goes for the carpet.

Long-run roofing can be salvaged, but there is no market for concrete roof tiles because no-one in Christchurch now wants a roof made of concrete.

As for the bricks, they are of modern design and have mortar inside them, making them unsalvageable.

And the framing timber is too hard to get at. Christchurch has a smoke-free regime, so it cannot even be used for firewood.

In the end, there is little of value in a modern house wrecked by earthquake.

"So it just gets smashed up," Bugden says.

His digger has a bucket and an extra "thumb" to help hold and break awkward pieces of house.

He pulls at the roof and collapses the building on to its concrete slab. Then he shovels it on to a truck.

And when he moves on to the next house, he leaves nothing but a patch of fine grey silt.

Within earshot of Bugden's digger lives business administrator Diane Hale-Fielding. She is one of the few remaining residents of the Pacific Park suburb.

But she is not still there by choice. Her house, which sank about a metre, is damaged beyond repair and a brand-new house has been waiting for her in another part of Christchurch since December.

She has already moved her plants but cannot move her furniture and herself there because she is waiting for the Christchurch City Council to "sign off" the new subdivision.

Inexplicably, the subdivision where her new house stands is still awaiting resource consent.

She complains about the Christchurch City Council.

"The council are, just excuse the expression, f... ing around and we can't get the paperwork through."

She considers the council is too busy with "in-fighting" and power struggles and has forgotten about "the real things that need to be done".

"We all need houses to live in. We all have to be out of here in a few months, so that's what their priority should be."

Hale-Fielding exudes a real sense of resilience in the face of turmoil.

She cheerfully recounts her reaction to the third big quake, in December, that would require her and her neighbours to again launch into a major clean-up.

As police, fire and council vehicles rolled into the suburb, a small group of earthquake victims parked their chairs on the front lawn, had a few drinks and got "plastered".

Emergency services, she says, considered their response not unreasonable.

Although the stories have been told innumerable times in newspapers and on television, there is still no more riveting account of the experience of going through a major earthquake than to sit across the kitchen table from someone who was there.

Hale-Fielding: "The first in September was terrific because you didn't know what had happened - that 4.30am one.

"We were all asleep in bed and, honestly, when I woke up I thought a train was coming through.

"You don't know where you are. You just don't know what's happened. And you just go into shock and you are running around and you get outside.

"There was just water spewing through the pipes in the road. There were sewers spewing everywhere.

"It was pitch black. People were screaming.

"Liquefaction was ankle- or knee-deep. You were wading through it.

"And you really thought you had gone off into another world and you were in a war.

"And then people were screaming that a tsunami was coming, so we all just piled into our cars and it was like bumper-to-bumper.

"The roads were broken. There were holes everywhere. The cars were nose-diving down into the holes. Yeah, it was pretty horrific ...

"You try not to think about it actually because that particular night was just a nightmare ... the fear everyone went through that night in the pitch black with the water, the roads, the holes just opening up in front of you.

"It was just absolute fear."

Fifteen months on, Hale-Fielding has a range of reactions to aftershocks.

Some she tries to ignore but for the "really bad ones" she curls up in a ball on the floor, next to a wall.

Hale-Fielding was driving near the CBD when the February 22 earthquake struck, killing 184 people.

She saw the "roads rolling" and the cars being "chucked every which way" and she saw the dust cloud rise above the city.