Hororata boy flung to ground from top-storey bedroom

TONY BENNY/The Press

CLOSE SCRAPE: Xavier Trousselot Rhodes sports injuries from his fall from his bedroom on the top storey of the Hororata Homestead in Canterbury during the region's September 2010 earthquake.

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The teenage survivor of a collapsed house in Hororata says lessons he learnt in school saved him.

"I took the thing that was sort of taught in school, which is take cover rather than try to escape, and that's what I did, hiding between the bed and the wall," Xavier Trousselot-Rhodes, 16, said.

"It all happened so suddenly. It wasn't like there was a gradual shaking.

"I pretty much rolled and, as I rolled to the right, the wall gave way."

Xavier said his cuts hurt more yesterday than when he was injured in Saturday's earthquake.

"I feel I was in shock [on Saturday], so that suppressed the pain," he said.

"I'm really stiff now and all of the cuts and grazes are stinging – my ankles and my hips, the back of my head where I smashed on to the bricks, under my chin, my eyes."

Xavier plummeted from his first-floor bedroom, along with bricks and timber, and ended up outside.

"I can remember being in the room and I can remember being on the ground, but I can't remember being halfway," he said.

"I think I was knocked out as I went through the wall by stuff smacking me in the head, and then I became conscious on the ground."

Xavier's father, Allan Rhodes, heard him screaming outside.

"I was just in my boxers, so I had nothing to protect me really, and yet the car I landed next to was written off. It looked like it had been through a war zone, and I'm so well-off in comparison," Xavier said.

Once he had been cleared of serious injury by Christchurch Hospital staff, Xavier returned to the house in daylight, searching for one of his most valued possessions.

"When I went back into the building when it was unstable, which was probably stupid, I found my cellphone eventually," he said.

"I had about 20 text messages asking if I was all right, but then, when I was on the news, I had another 30 or 40 text messages asking all the same questions."

Xavier's brother, Christian, could have been sleeping in the same bedroom but had decided to stay in Oxford with his mother because he was helping in a school production. His Hororata bed was buried under rubble.

Xavier went to church with his mother yesterday, thankful for his survival and grateful his brother was not in the house with him.

"Something was definitely protecting my Dad and I – the hand of God, definitely."

- © Fairfax NZ News