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Mary Anne Jackson at the new Canterbury Television offices, with a memorial wall to colleagues who died in the 2011 quake. Photograph: Charles Anderson for the Guardian
Mary Anne Jackson at the new Canterbury Television offices, with a memorial wall to colleagues who died in the 2011 quake. Photograph: Charles Anderson for the Guardian

Christchurch TV station's lone survivor recalls grief and defiance during quake

This article is more than 10 years old
On third anniversary of New Zealand earthquake, CTV staffer remembers working amid shock of losing peers to stay on air

The phone call saved her. Mary Anne Jackson does not remember who was on the line or what it was about, but on a quiet February afternoon the receptionist answered. Minutes earlier, she had been on the first floor of the Canterbury Television building – a six-storey structure in central Christchurch that housed the city's regional television company.

Above her were 16 colleagues who had just been organising a farewell function for an employee. On the top storeys were more than 100 others. They were working for other companies or studying at the English language school housed there. Then the noise began.

It sounded like a freight train or an plane landing on the roof, Jackson says. The ground began to shake. The windows began to buckle. From the outside you could hear screams and see the pillars start to snap. Jackson hesitated for a moment. Then she ran. The building was coming down around her.

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Flowers at the site of the CTV offices in Christchurch. Photograph: Charles Anderson for the Guardian

She got to the other side of the road and turned around. Jackson watched dust rise off the pile of rubble that used to be her workplace. She had first walked into it 20 years earlier. There was no one coming out. People poured out of other buildings and clambered onto the debris. Hundreds ran past her. Amid the chaos, all Jackson could do was stand there.

"I felt so alone," she says. "I felt like this was it. I was going to die it was just a matter of when." But she did not. While 115 people died in the building, Jackson was one of only a few to make it out alive. She was the only CTV employee. It was the site of the largest number of deaths in the earthquake.

Television images started pouring into news stations around the world. On 22 February 2011, Christchurch had suffered a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that devastated the city. The focus of those images was on the CTV building. Emergency services spent hours and days trying to rescue its inhabitants. Increasingly, it became a recovery mission. When the final tally was counted, 185 people would be dead. In those days, the structure and the letters CTV became a symbol of the destruction the earthquake wrought. However, the television station's owner was adamant that CTV would become a symbol of something else.

Nick Smith was driving south when the news came over the radio. The next morning he went to the site. It was clear CTV had lost everything – including 16 employees. Smith thought about what to do. The station did not make much money but it had insurance. At a site away from the city centre, he called a meeting of the staff that were not in the building that day. "We are getting it back up and running as soon as we can," he told them. It would be a testament to those who were lost, Smith says. They were dedicated employees who would have wanted the station to keep going.

So they moved out of the city and set up shop at Smith's son-in-law's company, Mainland Press, which owned several small newspapers though the region. On the first day they started back at work there was almost no time to think. Jackson says there were many sleepless nights. How did she get out? she thought. But being busy helped push them through dwelling on the past.

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The smoking ruins of the CTV building just after the quake, in 2011. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images

Many of them were facing their own mortality each time they walked through the doors of the new building. You could not escape it, Jackson says. "But being busy helped us. Sometimes it was better not to think too much about it. I was doing it for them. That's what got me through."

A storeroom became a studio and the company worked out of a single boardroom for weeks. It sourced new equipment from Japan but when the tsunami hit, CTV was once again painfully without the resources to relaunch a television station. But they got programming rights and temporary equipment and, only two months after the quake, CTV went back on air.

In times of disaster the actions of television stations come to the fore. They broadcast images across the world – of revolutions, stories of survival and those of tragedy. But it is when the broadcast stops altogether that the situation is most serious. In the case of New Zealand, the earthquake was one of the biggest stories in the county's history. It was its most significant natural disaster.

"It is a story that is evolving," says CTV's head of news and content Jacqui Shrimpton. "We wanted to cover and we will continue to cover it." Regional television is a difficult business in a market dominated by national outlets but CTV saw the earthquake as an opportunity to redefine its place in the psyche of a recovering city.

It increased its local content, changed its once prerecorded news programme to a live bulletin and increasingly tried to cement its place Canterbury's media landscape. "The most amazing thing is that we kept going but I'm not sure how many people are aware of that. We never went away," Shrimpton says. "As Christchurch has recovered we have too. We are a mirror to the community."

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An aerial view of the collapsed CTV building after the quake, in 2011. Photograph: Sarah Ivey/AP

She says there is still no real central city. There are still so many vacant spaces where buildings once stood. Thousands of workers had moved into the outer suburbs. The city was displaced as the station was too. CTV only had one news camera. It had to prioritise with events. "That puts us on the back foot but like the city we got up quickly when the odds were against us."

General manager Andrew Keeley says it had been a struggle but sees it as a way to look forward rather than look for sorrow from the days gone by. "It's never going to be forgotten. That will be our history but we as as a city need to move forward to grow and prosper." But the pain of that day still lingers.

A royal commission into the earthquakes found that the CTV building collapsed because it did not meet construction standards. It should never have been granted a building permit. But no prosecutions have been brought over the collapse. On the third anniversary of the earthquake, 22 February 2014, CTV staff, past and present, will gather at the site where their building once stood. It is now a fenced-off plot of vacant land. Across the road, 185 white chairs stand as a sculptural symbol of those that died. A single statement from the city council is affixed to the fence: "Please respect this site."

Jackson will be there. There will be singing and balloons with the names of those CTV employees that died will be released into the air. "Sometimes it feels like a different life," Jackson says. "Sometimes it feels like yesterday. For me, I'm doing it for them." Carrying on, helped her carry on.

They stayed in that temporary building and merged with Mainland Press. It was away from the CBD but people were shifted around to accommodate the new business unit.

A temporary cabin was set up in the carpark as a dressing room for on-screen talent and small memorial still stands outside the studio – a board with photos and names of those who died in the earthquake. It bears the message: "Always remembered." But despite all that was lost there was much to look forward to, Jackson says. Then she takes her seat at the entrance of the new building, still as the receptionist of Canterbury Television.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Christchurch: after the earthquake, a city rebuilt in whose image?

  • Cardboard cathedral planned for quake-hit Christchurch

  • Darkness at the heart of Christchurch, one year after the quake

  • Christchurch rocked by two large earthquakes

  • Christchurch welcomes blueprint for rebuilding after earthquake

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