A new challenge

Well a lot has happened since I wrote my last blog, and it has been extremely stressful for everyone living in Christchurch. Many of you will have heard about the earthquake we had here on February the 22nd. It was a very frightening experience and the aftermath has been even worse, with 180 lives taken and pretty much the whole of the city being destroyed affecting thousands and thousands of jobs and businesses. A lot of Christchurch suburbs experienced a lot of liquefaction coming out of the ground. Our house is fine, but we are the only street in our whole suburb that seems untouched. If we went just 100m in any direction liquefaction was everywhere, up to your waist on the streets and huge holes in the roads with cars stuck down them. Some liquefaction was in people's houses and had caused them to sink, and then nearly everything was flooded with burst water and sewage pipes. It was just so upsetting to see. Apparently 10 000 homes will not be able to be rebuilt as the land is too damaged. It is very stressful for all those people who still have no answers, and are now homeless. We feel very guilty that both ourselves and our house are fine.

At the time of the quake I had just got home from QE2 gym and was having lunch with Brett, so we were very lucky we were together. The shaking was so furious that I could not walk for more than 1 m from where I had been sitting, the whole floor was just bouncing around and everything was falling around us. I won this massive trophy in my last race Ironman Wisconsin. It is a big stone thing weighing maybe nearly 10kg. It flew across the room and nearly hit us (I was clinging on to Brett) and now there are huge gashes in our wooden floor from where it hit. That trophy and everything else that is a missile no longer lives in our house. Brett looked out the window and said the houses were all bobbing up like boats. The shaking only lasted 20 seconds or so, and it is overwhelming to see what damage was done to other buildings in such a small space of time. After the quake Brett and I had to leave straight away as we live about 2k from the beach and as you don't know where the quake is centred (onshore or offshore) you just have to go, we went to the airport until we could find out the information. In hindsight having seen the destruction and lives lost in Japan from the tsunami it was a smart move.

Anyway my experience was nothing to those who live in town where whole buildings fell down on top of people trapping them so I feel pretty silly how scared I have been these last months. I think being pregnant has made it worse, I have been very emotional and upset and I think I would have handled things a lot better if I was my normal self. I think being in your house at the time has meant that fear is connected to my house and I didn't feel safe there. I have only been able to go back in to sleep about 2 weeks or so ago. The first 2 weeks we slept in a tent in our back lawn with our dogs who didn't want to be in the house either. Then we went for a road trip and slept in our car for 2 weeks. We then came home and gradually things have been better. I can now go into the supermarket to go shopping (I was just too terrified to go into any buildings previously) and the other day Brett and I forced ourselves to go to the movies.

I am lucky I am not in training mode here at the moment. On our side of town all the roads are now gravel and so I haven't been cycling since, since I am getting too big now anyway and it would be irresponsible of me for the baby. The forest is now banned, where I used to do all my running. It has been taken over as a dump (it used to be the old dump). So now they have dumped 300 000 tonnes of the silt and they will dump all the rubble from the buildings and houses for the next few years. We still sneak in anyway as it is one of my favourite places to walk. If you just work out which way the wind is blowing you can keep away from the dreadful smell of the silt. But the worst is QE2 which is 1200m from our house. It has always been my favourite place as a kid and it is where I did all my swimming, track workout and gym etc. It was built for the 1974 commonwealth games and now it is very badly damaged. I go over and look through all the windows every few days, I'm not sure why. I think the 50m pool looks OK, the diving well I can see has had liquefaction come up through it, but the whole building looks structurally like they may not let people back in, and they may have to rebuild the whole thing. The gym where I was just minutes before has the ceiling collapsed and beams have come down, they are on top of the treadmills, I really hope people were not badly hurt. The track is ripped up with liquefaction. Anyway it is sad to see.

So there is a lot of work to be done to rebuild Christchurch and when it is done it will be the most beautiful city again. We won't be there for that though. We put our house up for sale 4 days before the quake. We had been wanting to do it for months as we really wanted more land to utilise and a change of lifestyle, but we held off as at the end of last year I received a contract with the Christchurch Symphony which meant I would be working many more hours than before (but now sadly the town hall is out of action for at least the rest of the year). So we decided to stay, but then it kept bugging us that we really wanted more land and a change of lifestyle away from the city. So we put our house on the market 4 days before the quake, and the day of the quake we were to have 2 offers. After the quake one of those still wanted to put in an offer so we accepted that, but it has taken over a month to get to the unconditional phase as engineers checks needed to be done and there were complications with getting insurance etc. So anyway it was finally done yesterday and we put in an offer on the place we wanted to move to yesterday as well, and that was accepted. So we have a new direction and challenge ahead on a 4 acre lifestyle block.