A Walk Along the River …
Last week was all about coming out of proof mode and playing catch up, on all sorts of things: correspondence, tax stuff, completing the “Encountering Fantastic Worlds” blog post series (here and here), putting in some serious reading on The Alloy of Law and The Way of Kings (you can see what I thought here), and thinking ahead to what needs to happen next in the world of writing books.
But one thing I realised is that I haven’t done an earthquake report for a while and today seems as good a time as any.
Firstly, the earthquakes haven’t stopped yet, but they’ve certainly slowed down a lot—we can go whole series of days now without having any, although there are still a fair number of mid to high 3.0s coming through. It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had a 4.0, though. Having said that, there was a 5.5 as recently as 9 October so I don’t think anyone’s ready to say “it’s over” quite yet.
Demolition remains ongoing all over town, but particularly in the CBD with quite major buildings, such as hotels and high rise office buildings, continuing to come down. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament has been confirmed as a full demolition, while the Anglican Christ Church cathedral looks set to go the same way. Although a much more modern building, the synogogue was also looking fairly unhappy when I walked past it the other day. (In fact the two most significant casualties of the February 22nd earthquake, the PGG and CTV buildings, were relatively modern so that proved to be no guarantee of anything.)
The demolition continues in the suburbs as well, with lots of gaps in small local centres and some houses going, too—and just up the road, quite a large aged-care facility. But partly because the buildings are smaller, partly because the sites are more dispersed, the effect is not as great as in the central city—you just don’t get the same swathes of levelled ground. But today I went for a walk along an area of the river that I used to traverse regularly and really looked, and I have to admit that it was sobering. Not in any overtly dramatic sense, although there have already been demolitions, but just really taking in how very few homes are still inhabited. Most yards were full of unmown grass and overgrowing shrubberies, and while ‘ok’ at first glance, a closer look at many of the houses showed whole portions that had twisted, or buckled, or slumped forward. After several kilometres of empty neighbourhood I could not help reflecting, after returning to our street, that ok, we’ve been hard hit, with a lot of repair work still needing to be done—but at least we still have a neighbourhood and the sense of community that goes with it.
And slowly, recovery is happening: the local boys’ high school is back on its own site, the pupils no longer being bussed across town; the area mall has re-opened. But those sections of empty neighbourhood I walked through today … to paraphrase “the Boss”: “they’re going, boys, and they ain’t coming back” (from “My Hometown.”)
It has been said before – the city will never be the same.
We are living that now.
Like many things that are said often, that may simply be because it’s true. Also obvious, I agree … go figure! There was something about all those empty homes that felt very sad though—a forlorn-ness.