Bruce Ansley: What happens when things you love get broken

Undeterred by the earthquake, Alvin Foo and his bride, Li Junhui, flew from Singapore to have their wedding photos taken in Christchurch. Photo / Sarah Ivey

At 4.35 this morning we marked a terrible anniversary in Christchurch: It was exactly a week since our lovely city was torn apart.

Like many others I was awake for the occasion. The constant aftershocks following last Saturday's earthquake make the darkest hours of the morning the worst.

They come in a growing roar.

The air dies, leaving a momentary void before the shake hits, slamming around the house for seconds that feel like hours.

They seem a betrayal in this city, which until this unsuspected fault zone cracked open thought itself largely immune from earthquakes.

Now we're experts on the Richter scale: we freeze as the shock hits, come back to life as it grumbles off, deliver judgment: 3.2, or 4.1, then we listen to the radio for confirmation.

The second big quake, triggered on Wednesday morning by a fault within the city rather than 30km outside, was different.

It attacked in broad daylight, clubbing us without warning as we ate our breakfast, striking so fiercely that for the second time in a week I imagined my hilltop home must be ripped from its site and turned into a huge wood-and-concrete toboggan.

Unbelievably, it remained intact.

The crashing was not windows breaking, only pottery. Funny, someone said, what happens when things you love get broken. Suddenly they're just stuff.

And we still have the fabled magnitude-six aftershock to look forward to.

Numbers have taken on a scale of their own. We live with them.

The damage will cost $4 billion.

The quake registered 7.1, a once-in-2000 years, 16,000 years, 85,000 years event, depending on who is telling the story. We are allegedly safe for another 1000 years.

We are more concerned that six out of 10 houses in the region are said to be damaged, 2300 probably uninhabitable.

In Christchurch's hierarchical fashion, the disaster has often hit the less well-off; areas such as New Brighton, Bexley, Kaiapoi. They stand on sand and silt which the earthquake liquefied into porridge.

Well-heeled suburbs such as Sumner, Cashmere or Fendalton and so on were largely spared.

Christchurch institutions such as Christ's College and the venerable store Ballantynes escaped, along with the Christchurch Cathedral and the best of our heritage buildings.

Structures that were earthquake-strengthened, and newer buildings, as architect Sir Miles Warren chirped, survived very well. But country mansions such as the pioneer Deans homestead and Warren's own Ohinetahi were badly damaged.

Within that framework, earthquake damage is fickle.

Television news shows a flattened city yet I can drive through Sumner and around town and scarcely know there has been an earthquake. But a few streets away in Avonside I encounter the cold, wet face of disaster.

A friend's house has shifted on its foundations and sags in a corner. Reparable but heart-breaking. His garden covered in silt.

He proudly showed me the room prepared for their first baby, due in six weeks: painted pukeko blazing through bright forest. He'd get through it, he said. Life would go on.

Outside, the street was filled with road-workers, power company people, water engineers and teams of volunteers.

Few have faulted the city's response to this emergency. Christchurch's stable, cohesive community simply got together and worked through it.

The Christchurch Press published a photograph of a woman's 4-year-old home, hopelessly damaged, being abandoned. The woman sought refuge with her daughter in a different part of town, in a house so badly damaged it tilts. Her son's modern house to the north of Christchurch was cracked apart.

The entire family, spread over three separate parts of the region, has suffered. Yet tracts of undamaged houses lie between them.

When this disaster fades from the six o'clock news, and the politicians take their public faces of concern back to Wellington, what will happen to this city?

Mayor Bob Parker, whose calm amid the chaos has won ground against the other leading mayoralty candidate, Jim Anderton, now says some new subdivisions should never have been built, and may not be rebuilt.

But not all the houses in any street are ruined; some are still habitable. No one will pay for new houses to replace them. Will the survivors stand like relics on a bombed street?

Will the insurance companies, now taking full-page ads assuring the public they're here to help, meet the full cost of restoring bigger, older houses? And if the houses are repaired, will they be insurable?

Many of the Edwardian and Victorian brick buildings in the central city will be demolished.

What will replace them?

Following the 1931 earthquake, Napier rebuilt in an art deco style which has turned that city into a modern tourist attraction.

The early 21st century lacks that commonplace charm. Already the city fears a rash of cheap low-rises.

Or great gaps in central city streets, for here's another number being batted around: Christchurch had far too many shops, twice the retail area per head of population of Auckland. The recession had already emptied many shops and "for lease" signs were sprouting like daffodils this spring.

Disaster has a life of its own.

Some have left the city, or sent their children away, for the stress of spending each night dozing between aftershocks stretches sanity to breaking-point. But most have stayed.

The city's eccentricities still show through. A digger nosed into a ruined building, delicately plucking a chandelier between steel forefinger and thumb and presenting it to the bungy-jumping pioneer A.J. Hackett on his wedding day amid the rubble.

Then someone suggested a new slogan: Christchurch: We Rock!

We count our blessings: the death toll remains at one cow and one lemur.

* Bruce Ansley is an award-winning journalist and author. He is working on a new book set in New Brighton in Christchurch.