It was just a normal hot summer's day and I had walked down to the café to have a cup of coffee at the intersection of Kilmore and Barbadoes Streets - which is very central. I was sitting in there with a couple of young mothers with their babies when the earthquake began.
It was just huge. It felt like the end of the world.
I just thought, Oh gosh, here it is, the end of the world.
We all staggered outside into the street and everything just happened really quickly. The buildings collapsed around us. The building opposite me – a picture-framer's, which I was going to go into – I just saw it drop.The woman next to me looked at me without speaking and suggested I would take her baby, and I said yes. She wanted to get over the road to her car so she could call her husband and I just stood there with this baby and these shocks kept coming, and more stuff kept falling down all around us.
People were just stunned. I remember saying "we're alive" and being very incredulous at what had happened.
Help
After I got home, a neighbour came over from next door and we thought there must be huge fatalities so I remember filling up bags of bandages and towels and we went down to Latimer Square.
Sure enough, the scene was just sheer pandemonium.
It was very close to the CTV building where 115 people were killed on that day and you could see that in the backdrop at the end of the square.
READ MORE: Christchurch united after quake, former mayor says
There was a group of off-duty nurses and doctors who had formed an area where body bags where coming to and people were being tended to.
My friend and I went up there and dropped our stuff there, painkillers and whatever we had. Helicopters were dropping off bags of hospital gear.
Everyone was running around in a panic. All around us there were buildings collapsed and there was a complete riot of noise.
The first thing I did was contact my brothers. I sent them a message that said, "I'm OK, I’m alive". Luckily, that managed to get through before the network collapsed.
The roads were full of people who were throwing stuff into their cars out of their houses and getting into this line that didn’t move. And they wouldn’t look at you. Their hands were clenched, white knuckled on the steering wheel. They just wanted to get out of there really quickly.
There were mothers weeping because they couldn’t get to their children on the other side of town to get them out of school.
I remember being stunned by the girls with high-heeled shoes and bags, walking home with blood on their heads and looking as if they were trying to keep control.
It was a question of comforting people as you went along.
The song in the above audio track is provided courtesy of Tiny Ruins and Spunk Records
This year, The Feed's Patrick Abboud went to Christchurch to see how the city was recovering from the 2011 earthquake. Watch his report below:
