Key tells of own dark quake hour
Pike River tragedy haunts Key
The hardest decision Prime Minister John Key had to make after his dash to Christchurch on February 22 was to fly back to Wellington that night.
‘‘It felt a bit like I was abandoning them. There was nothing I could do more than we were doing. But it felt a funny thing leaving.’’
One year on from the earthquake, Mr Key still remembers those first impressions of a city that had been thrown into chaos by a violent quake. It felt, he says, like a war zone.
‘‘I knew we were dealing with an enormous tragedy; it was just obvious from the devastation on the ground . . . it was everywhere. It was like Beirut. It was just a city that had been brought to its knees.’’
When the quake struck at 12.51pm on February 22, Mr Key was in his 9th-floor Beehive office with a business delegation.
They stopped talking briefly after the building was rocked by a ‘‘reasonably violent shake’’. ‘‘About two or three minutes later the door opened, my chief of staff Wayne Eagleson came in and said: ‘Just to let you know, that wasn’t an earthquake in Wellington, it was an earthquake in Christchurch.’ ’’
The office was cleared and the next hour was a scramble to get information before Parliament sat at 2pm. Mr Key texted his sister, who lives in Christchurch. Her house had been badly damaged in the September 4 quake.
‘‘I sent her a text and said, ‘Are you OK? . . . She said to me: ‘Look, it’s really bad.’ ’’
As information started in, officials told him to heavy casualties.
Within hours, Mr Key was in Christchurch. He found a city in shock, and devastation on a large scale.
‘‘We just didn’t know how many people were trapped. We knew we were working against the clock.
‘‘We knew that if we didn’t get those people out and buildings continued to collapse there would be real problems. My sister actually rang me and had a friend who was on the top of the PGC building and he was trapped right up the rolling expect top and she was literally screaming at me down the phone to do something, get him off.
‘‘I was saying . . . ‘What can I do? We’ve got people there, they’re doing the best we can, we just have to work through it.’
‘‘They did eventually get the guy off the building. But to a certain degree that sense of helplessness . . . there was a lot happening, we were doing everything we could, but the sheer scale of it was, I think, a bit overwhelming for everyone.’’
Mr Key delivered a speech to the nation referring to the quake as New Zealand’s ‘‘darkest’’ hour. His own darkest hour came as he was preparing to give a press conference in Latimer Square.
‘‘I remember thinking, this is a city I grew up in, I knew it really well. And it was destroyed.’’
The Government’s response in the following days involved not just the rescue, but how to keep the heart of Christchurch beating.
‘‘In a way we almost broke every rule in the book. You’d never establish a fund where you just say: ‘Ring up and we’ll give you money,’ because governments don’t operate like that and if you do, they’re liable to all sorts of activity which could be fraudulent.
‘‘But we just sort of knew there was no way to have a system with all the bells and whistles on it . . . If you look back on it I reckon that actually kept Christchurch afloat.’’
He is optimistic for Christchurch. ‘‘I think it’s going to be reborn, if you like, as a very vibrant city. [But] I worry about the mental state of mind of people in the short term . . . I worry about the fact that people want it to stop, and actually we want it to stop too, and unfortunately you can’t.
‘‘It’s going to run its course . . . people are just sick of all of it. So I am absolutely amazed how people just get on with it.’’
For John Key’s full video interview and our special February 22 commemorative section, go to stuff.co.nz.