Quake-weary Christchurch residents ponder leaving

CHRISTCHURCH—Simon Bourke moved into his dream house in New Zealand’s Christchurch four years ago, but now says: “I’ll sell it to you for a dollar, and chuck in the wife as well.

“I just want to get out”.

Bourke’s cheeky quip about his wife earns him a shove in the shoulder from a female friend standing nearby but, like many in this quake-scarred city, he is serious about wanting to leave following another powerful tremor this week.

Monday’s 6.0-magnitude shake was the third major quake in Christchurch in the past nine months, including a devastating 6.3 temblor last February that killed 181 people.

The latest quake left huge mounds of silt and mud up to two meters (six foot) high dotting Bourke’s street in the suburb of Parklands, created when the force of the seismic pounding broke the bonds that hold soil together.

Prime Minister John Key this week said the process, known as liquefaction, meant thousands of homes in New Zealand’s second-largest city would have to be abandoned because the ground was now too unstable to rebuild.

“You could see all this stuff bubbling out of the ground, it was much worse than February,” Bourke’s wife told AFP.

It was a bitter blow for the couple, who had to abandon their house for three weeks after the February disaster because its foundations had been undermined.

“I’d never even heard of liquefaction before September,” Simon Bourke said, referring to the first 7.0 quake in Christchurch last year.

“Now here we are again.”

Combined with the threat of constant aftershocks — a shallow 5.0 shake early Wednesday jolted residents awake but caused no further damage — the latest liquefaction setback has steeled the couple’s resolve to leave.

Simon found himself thigh-deep in ooze when he fell into a sinkhole while inspecting damage from Monday’s quake and, though he was unharmed, Anna said it was the final straw.

“If it was deeper he could have disappeared over his head,” she said, as construction diggers worked on the street to clear the mess.

“It’s hard when you’ve got kids, you’ve got to think of your family. No one can guarantee this won’t happen again.”

The couple’s neighbor Chris Innes was preparing to move back into his house on Saturday after extensive repairs following February’s quake.

Instead, he found himself shovelling silt from his pathway next to a sinkhole that swallowed his front garden.

“The whole place will have to come down now,” he said. “The house itself fared quite well but the land it’s built on is stuffed.”

Innes said he would like to move away but can’t because he is still paying a mortgage on his ruined property.

“That’s it,” Bourke chipped in. “If you move away you chuck away your whole financial future.”

In the city’s port area of Lyttelton, a woman named Marie, who declined to give her surname, said she was staying put.

“My lifestyle is here,” she told AFP as clouds of dust from silt that had dried in the sun rolled over the town.

“Anyway, who’d buy your house now? Who’s going to buy a house in a place that’s shaking to bits?”

Lyttelton was among the worst hit areas in Monday’s quake, with the historic 134-year-old Timeball Station — which used to indicate the time to ships — reduced to rubble.

Even the dead cannot rest in peace amid the area’s constant seismic rumblings, with Lyttelton’s graveyard closed and a large sign erected among its toppled stone memorials warning “dangerous headstones”.

However, Henry, a demolition worker who was helping remove debris at the Timeball Station, said Christchurch would prove resilient.

“Never mind, we’ll tear it down and reconstruct it,” he said, gesturing to the ruins.

“Reconstruct, reconstruct, reconstruct, that’s what we’ll do.”