The portaloos are coming

One fine moment in this evening’s TV coverage of the Canterbury earthquake... The residents of some badly hit street are standing at their gates watching the TV crew. Some are complaining bitterly about what they see to be local council neglect of them in their plight. They are sans water, sans sewerage system, sans electricity, and everything around is broken. Some of their houses are snapped in half.

...and as we speak a big lorry comes into view, rumbling up the road, laden with portaloos. It’s like the Berlin Airlift, only at a different pace and without the elegance of the DC3s banking down towards Tempelhof. Cheers rise from every gate, and the queues start to form. Using a bucket, I guess, has been just a little too reminiscent of the facilities in the railway cattle vans heading eastward to Auschwitz.

Christchurch, and places such as Darfield, Kaiapoi, Hororata, are going to take years to recover from this. Out in Bexley, too close to the settling ponds, whole streets of houses around five years old are now having to be demolished. Each house, some family’s dream, is not only damaged beyond repair, but is sitting on wretched terrain which has simply bubbled and jellified into a deep sludge of sewage and sand and heaven knows what. Who gave planning permission for this particular catastrophe?

The wooden structures seem to have fared best. The rather large stone Anglican church at Hororata lost the whole top of its bell tower, which fell through the roof and destroyed the organ. The organ is in a million pieces, says the vicar, a woman who seems to have trained in the Dibley college of pastoral theology. Never mind, she said, for right across the road is their previous church, an old wooden one, and that’s just fine for now. I’m sorry about the organ though.

A lot of churches have been badly damaged. Some of those Christchurch churches are fine even lovely buildings, but there are a few redolent mainly of cheap brass and formica, and a thin theology of worship. So it’s not all bad. Of course, some of the uglier ones, by some perversity, are the best loved. I’m thinking of one church which has all the charm and worshipful ambience of an electricity substation, and if there is any justice it will go.

It’s interesting I think, and a sign of the times, that the media coverage over three days now has had scarcely any mention of the churches. One or two photos, but that’s all. Other heritage buildings have had coverage. But even their two cathedrals seem to have escaped notice by the media. Both have been recently earthquake strengthened (at public expense, I may say), and have got by with little damage.

There were no fatalities, which is astonishing, and no rush of bad injuries. The housing has been the biggest casualty, I think, and small business premises. There are a lot of broken hearts. A lot of people now mortgaged for sums far beyond anything their properties are now worth.

I heard one laconic police officer say they had apprehended in the middle of the night two well known local criminals trying to get into the cordoned area under the guise of being council staff. ‘Ullo, ‘ullo, ‘ullo, what ’ave we ‘ere then...? It would have been interesting to hear the actual conversation.