Editorial: Quake city still battling aftershocks

AS PART of our Year in Review series we today look back at February 2011.

A fair bit happened in Hawke's Bay in February but it was all overshadowed by the devastating Christchurch earthquake on the 22nd.

As we round out the year, it is worth reflecting on how much the citizens of Christchurch have coped with in the past 10 months.

The earthquake hit at 12.51pm on a Tuesday. In our newsroom, we watched the drama unfold on television news feeds. It quickly became apparent that the garden city was in the throes of a natural disaster on a scale not seen in New Zealand for decades.

With 181 lives lost, the toll was the second biggest in European settlement of New Zealand - the worst being the Hawke's Bay earthquake of February 1931, which claimed 256 lives.

Hawke's Bay responded to the disaster in Christchurch immediately and on many fronts. Even 80 years after the quake that devastated Hawke's Bay, our region still felt it had to go the extra mile to assist on the ground in Christchurch and by bringing quake refugees here for respite.

The resilience of the citizens of Christchurch in defiance of an act of nature that shook their city to the core is inspiring. Not that the quake and its aftermath has not had an impact on the number of people prepared to live in Christchurch. The latest unadjusted migration figures show that 6500 Christchurch residents have moved overseas since the quake.

That should start to balance out when the long-awaited rebuild begins - although there is no shortage of complications around that process, not the least of which is the difficulty for developers to get insurance cover for new buildings.

At the opening of the 50th Parliament yesterday, the Government reiterated its pledge to spend $5.5 billion on the rebuild of the city.

That's a huge encouragement but not a great immediate help to Rob McCormack, for example.

Mr McCormack is the first person to get a consent to rebuild a multi-level property in the central city red zone, on the site of his former five-storey building, demolished this year.

The NZ Herald has reported that both his former insurer, QBE, and Vero were not interested in offering insurance cover and a quote from Lloyds was many times the normal cost.

Mr McCormack points out that everyone is talking about a rebuild but the reality was extremely confronting. "I'm the first with a building consent. I have spent $678,000 to this point. The build is $6 to $7 million. I have money set aside for the rebuild ... and I may have to pull the plug."

For Christchurch, it seems, the aftershocks just keep coming.