ERC2018 – Registration in Post-Quake Christchurch

 

Discussing emergency planning with colleagues is a difficult, fascinating and an almost impossibly challenging task. Just how do you plan for the scenarios you can’t really visualise and never ever want to take place? Hearing what Gina Irish from Christchurch Art Gallery in New Zealand had to say from the perspective of someone who had actually been through it was one of the easiest choices I made at ERC. However for me it wasn’t just professional interest. I grew up down the coast from Christchurch and I have family and friends who live there and experienced the quake and lived through its aftermath of liquefaction, no power, sewage or water systems, aftershocks and finally the ongoing battles to get insurance payments on damaged homes years after the quake. This one was always going to be personal.