A sobering first-hand account of the unceasing trauma caused by the Christchurch earthquakes emerged as Queenstown Lakes District Council emergency management officer Brenden Winder told of a city still "smashed to pieces - it stinks and it's broken".
Mr Winder will leave this weekend for a three-month secondment with the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. He was part of a QLDC and Lakes Environmental emergency delegation sent to Canterbury in the immediate aftermath of the February quake and said he came away with a "page full of learnings".
Just two hours before big tremors unsettled Canterbury again on Monday, Mr Winder showed his video footage of the cordoned-off CBD "red zone" to illustrate the gravity of the destruction at a council-convened debriefing involving QLDC earthquake response frontline staff and other interested parties in the Lakes district.
Aftershocks like Monday's 6.3- and 5.7-magnitude tremors continue to complicate the CBD clean-up, with putrefying food, airborne asbestos, loose bricks, masonry and roofing iron as well as choking dust and cloying mud in damaged and liquefied parts of the city.
"It's still a dangerous and volatile place ... It's eerily quiet; there's hardly any birdlife, lots of vermin. It stinks in there; it's quite grotesque," Mr Winder said of the red zone.
In a city full of abandoned retail stock, which might incite looting "in another country", Mr Winder said the people of Christchurch should be given credit "that they haven't dropped their bundle and grabbed that stuff".
With no deaths attributed to buildings constructed after 1991, the sturdier building codes introduced that year should be recognised as "one of the heroic parts of this event", he said. He also credited the beefed-up code with halting the spread of a "massive fire", which so often wreaked further damage in major urban quakes.
Mr Winder also described the logistics of the ongoing clean-up, with 1000 abandoned cars having been removed by soldiers and 12km of fencing erected.
Also, 9.5 tonnes of rubble and waste would have to be taken from the city every three minutes for at least the next six months, a task involving 26 demolition companies, and 400,000 breaks in the city's water infrastructure would have to be repaired individually.
