It Wasn't Supposed To Be Christchurch

As I sit here typing this 147 people have been confirmed dead and more than 200 are missing after Tuesday's earthquake. Hundreds of families who are bracing themselves for another night without their father, mother, brother, sister, niece or nephew.

Our beautiful second city is broken. Thousands who haven't lost their family members, no longer know if they have jobs or a home. Entire suburbs are cut off without power, sewerage and water and what was once a 15 minute drive, now takes two hours in an SUV to access.

And for those of us in Wellington, one of the many things that keeps cropping up in conversations is the bewildered, sometimes disbelieving "It wasn't supposed to be Christchurch."

It was supposed to be us. Our city is the one built on top of a fault line. In fact, we're the geniuses whose only arterial motorway is going to disappear into a gaping chasm when the earth roars because its built directly on top of said fault line. And built our national museum on reclaimed land which is going to fall into the ocean. We're the ones who after a couple of years no longer register anything below a 4.0. We're the ones who were resigned that if not us, then our children, or our grandchildren would one day be assaulted with the big one.

And then it wasn't us. Instead, we're the ones standing by helplessly glued to the news as the catalogue of devastation unravels by the hour. The miracle of 4 September, when the earth shook at 4am in the morning sparing countless lives, disappeared. In it's place images of people running and screaming, buildings toppling and the earth splitting brought everything to a stand still.

And then frantic chaos as people reached for phones. A nation of four million people. Everybody has either lived in Christchurch, or has family or friends down there. People who worked in the buildings that we were seeing had been destroyed. Or who lunched in the mall that was now buried in rubble.  Or who lived in areas we were told had been flattened.

And then within hours rescue and emergency teams from Australia, USA, UK, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, China and Singapore on their way. We can never repay the men and women who currently have the harrowing job or sifting through the remains of our city looking for survivors and those who haven't made it.

Our beautiful grand English Christchurch is broken and its people will be hurting for a long time. But we have so much to be thankful for.