The First Person Identified by Our ID Cards
Earthquakes are all around the world and are bad for all people that are in it. A woman was in the kitchen and her husband was sick and was home and all of the sedin the house started to move she did not know what to do. All and all she got out of the house and her husband got out to. This person was asleep but she thought that it was a dream and eerd the sound but she still thought it was a dream. This 7-year-old was scared because of her dad he was saying wake up and i thought he was kidding because he always makes jokes but this time he was not. it was my mum’s birthday. She said it was the worst birthday present ever. I was at school, in science.
We felt the quake, but the teacher just said it would be a small one out in the canyon, so we didn’t do anything, or think anything of it. When I got home, it was all over the news, buildings down and people injured and dead. The very first person pronounced dead was a friend of mums, who she used to work with. The bad birthday just got worse. it feels longer than six years since the February 2011 events, but to this day I still feel quite tearful thinking about it, I am as I type these words. I find it hard to express how this has affected me to those who were not there but could talk for hours to those who were. I remember thinking as I went to bed the night before, things are starting to feel a little normal again. The September 2010 events had really hit the Canterbury region hard but no one had been killed, so we were all very grateful.
That day had felt different, the weather felt different and the sky even looked different. At the time I was working for the Christchurch City Council and worked with Civil Defence and the building inspectors as they went from door to door to the worst affected suburbs affected by the September 2010 events, assessing residential buildings. I worked as Welfare personnel, tasked with assessing people within their homes and what their needs were. I cried with people on many occasions with people after I asked how they were and they gave me an honest answers.
The week before the February 2011 events I had been able to return to my normal position within the Council and I was really excited about that. As I have already mentioned, the night before I thought “this is good, it feels like we are getting back to normal”. That was the last night we slept in that house and it was for many, many other people. I can’t describe the absolute panic I felt when I finally got to school to be greeted by children sitting in the playground waiting for their parents, crying, hysterical and the teachers looking a bit similar.
I thank God every day that I was not in the central city that morning, any other morning I would have been. I don’t know if I could have walked past people without helping them. A colleague of mine from work had done just that and it cost him his life, he was the first person to be identified because of our identification cards. From school I started to head towards town to get to my parent’s house and we were caught up in traffic for hours. Every radio station you tuned into was not operating, having been replaced by Civil Defence instead. I really started to panic as I changed each radio station and the same message was being replayed on each station. We were in Hagley Park for a long time when we could smell smoke, it seemed like a lot of smoke at the time. All of a sudden there were large numbers of people walking through Hagley Park towards us, having abandoned their cars, they walked. People abandoned their cars.
