My last day on holiday down South I spent in Christchurch being a tourist – I went to Secondary School, University & Film School in Christchurch so it holds a lot of fond memories, and I hadn’t been back since either of the two big earthquakes occurred in the last year, or the 7,000+ small quakes.. So it was a bit of a shock to see the scale of the damage. Watching the news or seeing photos just isn’t quite the same as seeing it for yourself… It was a lovely sunny day & we drove out to Sumner, past the many collapsed cliffs and when you look at the photo below you might likely think it is an idyllic beachside suburb:
But if you know Sumner at all you’ll appreciate the huge area that I’ve highlighted in the photo below that has collapsed:
It would be devastating to have your house irreparably damaged, but imagine what it would be like for your house to be instantly unsafe and you were not allowed back inside it again, ever, even to grab the most precious of your belongings! No amount of insurance can compensate for that…
Seeing suburban houses destroyed is sad but what really hit me was when we went over to Lyttleton, a small port town only 20km from Christchurch but it was the closest built up area to the second earthquake… Lyttleton is full of history, being a port it was the arrival point for many of the settlers to the South Island and for a small town it contained a lot of beautiful old buildings dating back to the turn of last century, and while suburban houses can be rebuilt, it was tragic to see the number of beautiful old stone buildings which have effectively been erased… They will not be rebuilt, because how could they?
Its sad that building is being demolished, but it was only when I went to google maps street view that I realised an even bigger building of the same era (on the left of the photo below) was gone – there was just an empty site there…
After exploring the port area we tried to go up to the TimeBall Museum, a beautiful old building with which I have personal history (my Fathers parents lived in Lyttleton & my gran Irene (RIP) used to often talk of the Timeball museum) but we were thwarted due to road closures…. But we stopped on the highest point we could reach overlooking Lyttleton harbour & sat and watched the ant sized activity below – it was quite hypnotic, at any one moment there would be a dozen large scale machines at work: trucks coming & going, giant forklifts grabbing huge clumps of timber & loading them on to trucks, ships cranes and beeping container movers doing their thing… So I dug out my 722 recorder and pair of DPA 4060s and recorded for a while, thinking about how there will always be progress, but somewhat mourning that some large parts of Christchurch’s history have been destroyed this year….
Here is a recording from the same place as the photo above was taken ie very wide/diffuse sound:
Here is a copy of that same recording with a low pass filter applied – interesting how much bottom end is present from such tiny mics!!
LyttletonPortLPF by timprebble
