The Day That Changed My Life Page #3

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Yeah!

Awesome.

We went from here to there

within-within minutes.

It was constantly emotionally

up, down, up, down, up, down.

I lost the feeling in my legs

within the first 20 minutes, 30 minutes,

and then I felt it starting

to leave my arms and my body,

so I started squeezing

my hands like this,

and then that wasn't enough, so I'd squeeze

them like this and move my head at the same time,

just to keep the blood

flowing through my body.

Think if I had stopped doing that,

I would have gone.

I was stuck in that position,

in sort of a curled over foetal position

for the next, I think,

four to five hours.

You just had to focus. Um...

Um, I was worrying about family

and my grandparents and just friends,

and every time my phone was ringing,

I was worrying about,... you know.

Flying into Christchurch to

see this big pool of smoke,

and I thought, 'God. That'll be-

That's the CTV building. '

You know, I didn't even know it

had started burning at that point.

And I rang Matt, my son,

and he came and collected me.

The whole city was sealed off.

Police were stopping people going in.

So I said, 'Look, um, my wife's in

that building, and I need to get there. '

So this policeman obviously looked

at me and saw how serious I was,

so he said, 'Oh, you better

jump in the back of the car. '

And that really hit me how

devastated the city was.

They still had bodies on the footpaths,

covered up with tarpaulins at that point,

cos they were so busy looking for people. And it

was-yeah, it's just the most surreal, sort of, feeling.

You could see bits

of the CTV building.

It was obviously down,

and it was burning.

There were various rumours going on at the

time that they'd found 15 people in a cavity,

uh, and that they're all OK, and

they were gonna be getting them out.

We all immediately thought that we were going

to get our loved ones out of that building.

I rang Susan's cell phone every hour

and left her a message.

'If you're in there, just wait.

We're not far away. '

And I tried to, um, give her as

much, um, support and love as I could,

and I wanted her to hear my voice.

I was losing so much energy, and

I thought, 'If you don't get me out now -

it's been about five, six hours -

'I'm gonna die. '

I just knew there

wasn't much left in me.

I think every 20 minutes or so, I just screamed

my lungs out. I was just in so much pain.

Some men outside,

they started sledgehammering

in through the second floor.

There was this ray of light, which

was like this wee bit of hope that...

we were gonna get rescued.

They managed to get in, and they were only

about 3m away and still couldn't see me.

This fireman, he said to me that he was gonna try and

pull me out, and I said, 'No, you can't pull me out;

'I'm really stuck. ' I still thought it was just

the desk or something. Um, so he looked behind me,

and he basically went, 'Oh crap. '

A 6-ton beam had dropped

on my lower back.

They finally got this

heavy-duty equipment.

He said to me, um, 'I'm gonna pull you. I'm gonna

pull you so hard, um, no matter what happens,

'and you're gonna get out, and if anything

happens, don't worry, because I'm here with you. '

It may have stayed up only about a

second, this beam, and then dropped,

and that's when the blood started rushing

through the lower half of my body again,

and the pain was just excruciating.

And they were trying to keep my eyes open, and

I was trying to-With all the strength I had left,

I was trying to hang in there, and it was

the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

And I just didn't

know how bad I was.

As the end of the day for me was drawing to a

close, a girl had been pulled out of the building,

um, and she was severely injured,

and by the time they were ready to transport

her, they were having to resuscitate her.

And, you know,

I said to the doctors -

and they'd done a really tough job or a

really excellent job in trying to stabilise her,

but she just continued to

deteriorate - and I said, you know,

'Christchurch Hospital are no longer

taking critically ill patients.

'They're being flown now

to Dunedin or Wellington. '

I said, you know, 'We can't justify a helicopter

for this woman if she's being resuscitated, '

you know, 'The chances of her

surviving are-are very remote. '

You know, so we had to make the tough decision of

basically putting her into the back of the tent,

and they sat with her and

held her hand while she died.

Um, so there were a number of,

you know, tough decisions where you think,

'My God, ' you know, 'people have risked their

lives digging her out, you know, doing all that,

'and for us then to turn round and say,

" Can't get her to Wellington,"' you know?

Um, it was really hard, but that

was kind of the reality of the situation.

So I think that, um, you know, there was a few things that

- that plague you, I guess.

That sort of made up the rest of the night, going from

person to person that had been either dragged out -

assessing them

- people that'd been crushed under chairs or office equipment or beams.

Near the end of the night, they could

hear six voices from six different places.

And I think they were able

to get three of them out.

Um, they didn't hear from the others again,

and I think they'd died from their injuries.

As it grew darker, um,

it started raining,

and we had blankets wrapped around

us. We were just basically looking into hell.

Um, I stayed there

for about 30 hours,

um, waiting.

It was an absolutely surreal situation, standing

there in your suit, wrapped in a blanket,

with your son,

looking into-into hell.

I didn't know what time it was.

Time just flew.

It was about 3am in the morning, and I just

happened to look across towards the river,

and I saw these two lines of men

in black uniforms and gold hats,

and I had no idea who they were,

what it was.

They were looking up at us.

Anyway, one of them came up

and, uh, was the squad leader,

and he said, 'I'm now in charge

of this site, and we're gonna take over. '

He'd been briefed by the fire chief. He said,

'You'll get resistance from these guys up there, '

and we just said,...

'It's all yours. '

For me, I grew up

that night on the Py-

on the...

On the Pyne Gould Guinness site,

it was...

I'd-I'd learnt what humility was,

I'd learnt what...

humanity was,

and I understood what

self-leadership was.

There was a group of 20-odd construction

guys that went into that job as strangers

and just came out as a

band of brothers. It was...

pretty profound.

Dawn came. The fire had

started to calm down.

Eventually, they came and said,

'Look, we're down to the third floor,

'and there aren't any survivors there,

and I'm really sorry to tell you that. '

I was trying to calculate where

Susan's office would've been,

and so she was on the fourth floor

at the back of the building,

and so when I looked

down this alleyway,

I could tell that that's where her office

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