By Bridget Gourlay
When it comes to natural disasters, arguably the most important thing is not the damage that’s done, but how we recover from it. Many Cantabrians showed their true colours after the earthquake.
Sleep-deprived and nervous from the unrelenting aftershocks, we made donations to relief funds, de-silted our elderly neighbours’ backyards and baked cakes for those living in shelters.
Like or loathe Mayor Bob Parker, the man showed leadership in his 20-hour working days after the earthquake. He toured the collapsed businesses. Walked the cracked streets. Spoke to the employers who have seen their livelihoods ruined in those fateful 40 seconds on September 4.
But when he addressed a think tank of people from the business community in September, his outlook for Christchurch was unrelentingly positive.
“I had a visit from the new ambassador from China who was very keen to come down because he had an earthquake guy from the embassy and he wanted to bring this guy in and offer any help that we wanted.
“He said to me something that really made me stop to think. He said, in all of the research and work that we’ve done in China and we’ve looked at every earthquake around the world and historical records and the rest of it, there’s never been an earthquake in a city of over seven of the Richter scale where there hasn’t been a significant number of people who have died and a huge amount of people who have been injured.
“Each of us in our own way will have been touched by something and lost something. But we haven’t lost somebody and that is absolutely remarkable and that is worth remembering as we go through what is going to be a really hard time in the next few months for business.
“We don’t have the tourist numbers coming into the city and that drives a lot of businesses, the central city area, which has been finding it really hard in the current economic climate — we really had a lot of people hanging on by their fingernails, who survived last year, who thought this year was going to be better — and this year has still been a really really hard year.
“There are issues around buildings — on one side there’s the desire to knock down, move on, build something up, on the other side, of course we want to protect our heritage and character, the things that shape the city and give the city so much of its appeal to all of us.
“So balancing all of these decisions is going to be one of the toughest decisions in the months ahead…
“The way we can get through this is simply the way we got through that first week and a half. It is going to be about supporting each another. It is about thinking, it’s about ideas and sharing those ideas and realising that councils or the Government or anybody in the community doesn’t have the exclusive rights on ideas.
“We’ve got to share them, we’ve got to work together, we’ve got to look after each other. And I want to look out for a second and see the revival and the optimism that we should be able to hold in our hearts as well.
“What’s really clear is, the scale of this event is enormous. Much bigger than we thought on the first day, much bigger than we thought on day three.
“But the scale of the money that will flow into repair this city, to bring us back to a place that will be close to normality — and that will be some time away — is going to be significant as well, and within that there lays a significant number of opportunities.
“What that really means for us is that in the short term, we will have a very hard time, but in the long term there will be a flow of capital into Christchurch which is going to be immense.
“For many people there is a vision of in their head of nothing in Christchurch except wrecked buildings. The media do not want to show you a street of people going about normal life, they want to show crumpled buildings, broken cars and general chaos. And of course there are elements of all those things that are part of the story that has happened.
“So the next challenge we face is, how do we take advantage of the massive raised profile of our city? Because there is a good side of that, because our ‘brand’ is out there, but the brand is associated with images of damage and destruction.
“If we can shift that name association to a story of recovery and hope and optimism then I think we have an even bigger opportunity as a city to write our own future in a way we never have before.”
