Street of mud and mayhem

IAIN MCGREGOR

Avonside Drive in Christchurch.

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Many Avonside residents are preparing to call in the bulldozers or face a long wait before they can return to their damaged homes.

Avonside Drive, hugging the banks of Christchurch's Avon River, is largely impassable, riven with gaping cracks, flooded with thick, grey silt and littered with cordons.

In places the river is choked with sewage, reducing the flow to a trickle.

Along the street families pack belongings into cars and shovel mud from driveways.

Some houses appear unscathed, while next-door another lopsided home is sinking into the ground, with silt, bricks and concrete strewn across the front yard.

Resident Viv Montgomerie was packing her car, preparing to drive with her daughter to her parents' South Brighton home.

Her partner, Rick Garner, said the house, adrift from its foundation and riddled with cracks, was only good for demolition.

When Saturday's quake hit, Montgomerie thought it was the cat scratching at the door. "When I got up, it was like I was in a boat. It was rolling, absolutely rolling," she said.

Montgomerie quickly gathered her 18-year-old daughter Gabrielle and Garner and sat huddled in her bedroom doorway, waiting out the tremors by candlelight until dawn.

When the aftershocks subsided, the family pulled out a gas stove and made breakfast, before getting in the car and braving broken roads, barriers and floods to reach Montgomerie's parents in South Brighton.

Down the road, 90-year-old Elaine French's family home of more than 60 years was in the hands of the insurance gods. The house moved about 40 centimetres in the quake.

French's son, Graham French, said he was unsure if the home could be saved.

"The interior's fine, just a few cracks, but I guess the insurance people will tell us the rest," he said.

During the tremors French said his mother was most concerned about the mess. "I was trying to get her under the table, but she was busy trying to pick everything up and tidy up while it was all going on," he said.

His mother was fine, he said, and staying with family.

Her driveway, however, had five crevasses.

Moving the car out of the garage took a team of people about an hour, Graham French said, as they filled the gaps with chunks of wood and put planks on top.

"It was a huge operation, but I've been so amazed by people's kindness, as we had complete strangers stopping to help out."

For every person in Avonside whose home had been damaged there seemed to be another carrying on as usual amid the mess.

- © Fairfax NZ News