Faultline: My Decade From February 22nd, 2011
Today is the 10th anniversary of the February 22nd, 2011, earthquake that devastated my home city of Christchurch and the surrounding Canterbury area.
The period from 4 September 2010 through to the first quarter of 2012 was one of continuous seismic activity, with over ten thousand events recorded, four major earthquakes and an additional three to four that were also significant in terms of damage. The most significant event, however, in terms of loss of life, injury, physical devastation, and human and economic cost, was the February 22nd event.
The aftereffects of the earthquake were years of disaster recovery slowly transforming to the rebuilding process that is still ongoing, along with ongoing insurance processes that were as traumatic as the preceding natural disaster; a failure of leadership at the government level, and widespread hardship for many, including unprecedented demands on mental health services. This is, of course, only my personal summation, but reading some of the material appearing in national and local news media in the leadup to this 10-year anniversary, I am not alone in my view.
In posting on the tenth anniversary today, I was intending to look in more depth at some of these factors and also to note some of the positives that helped me and others to keep going through the past decade. Short version: the people, the people, the people at personal, neighbourhood, and the wider community level. All these matters are addressed, to some degree or other, in the Categories Earthquake Reportsย and Earthquake Poems, right here on the blog. (Look in the far-right side bar ๐ )
This past week, though, led me to understand that while I could have written such a post, my heart just wasn’t in it. The beginning of that understanding was last Sunday, 14 February, while listening to the Sunday Morning programme on Radio New Zealand. (That’s NZ’s main public radio broadcaster, for those of you who are not NZ-ers.) The host was talking to a documentary filmmaker, Gerard Smyth, about the about-to-be-released sequel to his 2011 documentary, When A City Falls. The new documentary is called When A City Rises: The Peoples’ Story, and no doubt charts the course of the past decade.
I say “no doubt”, because the moment host and filmmaker began talking I found I could not listen. I had to get up and switch the radio off.
The moment was painful, both because of the door it blasted open onto all the difficulties of the past decade, but because it illuminated that for me, those much vaunted processes of “healing” and “moving on” are—at best—still very much a work in progress.
I believe this realization began toward the end of last year, when visiting friends said, “You’ve got on with your life. You’ve moved on.” To which I replied “Sort of.” I could not be more positive than that, because in the moment of replying, I realized that having moved on was not my truth.
My truth is that the past decade has left a faultline through my life, one that begins with February 22nd and the damage to my home, and ends in my heart. Rather than narrowing as the decade progressed, it was significantly widened in places, not only by the government-led*ย “recovery” and “rebuild”, but chiefly the brutality of the insurance process. Perhaps not surprisingly, once so major a faultline occurs, subsequent life events that are not directly connected to it, from terminal illness among close family and friends, through the massacres at two Christchurch mosques on March 15 2019, to Covid-19, all become fractures off the main fault.
“All right?” became a catchphrase for mental health and community wellbeing promotion in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes. When I apply its lens to my personal journey through the past decade, my truth can’t manage more than that “sort of.” Then again, maybe that’s what surviving looks like: it may always be a process rather than an endpoint.
And if you’ve read to the end, thanks for bearing with me, and for being here. ๐
—
*For me, there must always be a question mark over the "led", as in my view leadership at that level has been almost entirely missing-in-action. ** "Awhi" means to embrace and cherish, with a strong nuance of emotional support, in the Maori language.
Hugs. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for being here, Nalini
oh boy, Helen this really spoke to me. thanks and big virtual covid safe hugs.
I am glad if the post spoke to you, Jacqui. The more so because I know you’ve had a tough journey through the past decade. You won’t be surprised to know it took some time to write.
Wow. This hit me like how an award-winning short story ought to affect me. Except this is real-life, not fiction.
A lot has occurred in Christchurch over the last 10 years. All of which have lingering long-term effects, whether they be tangible or not so obvious.
Take care. If you are still dealing with insurance and repairs, its not really over
June, that is quite an accolade (re the power of the writing) so thank you. You are right, too, the emotional faultlines that run through Christchurch I suspect correlate pretty much exactly with the ‘crackle glaze’ of seismic faults that underlie the city. Thank you for being here for me & the books.
A virtual hug from this side of the world, too.
Thank you, Marion. I look forward to the time when we can all hug in person again, as I’m sure you do, too. ๐