What happens when disaster strikes? My experiences of natural disasters as a travel agent and personally.

Having worked in the travel industry the majority of my adult life I have had to deal with the aftermath of various natural disasters professionally.

Christchurch cathedral, still standing, still not repaired.

It is never easy for travelers to be caught up in these situations and generally I am amazed at how reasonable and calm the majority of people in these sort of situations have been and appreciative of the help a caring travel agent can give them to rearrange and advise.

The truth is you just get on with it, do what you have to do and try to retrieve as much of the holiday as you can as it is no ones fault with earthquakes, ash clouds and extreme weather so the main thing is to just keep safe.

So yes these sort of things do happen very occasionally and I have got used to dealing with unusual scenarios whilst my clients have been on holiday . There has been  the Iceland ash cloud, various riots or coups in Bangkok and Fiji, BA strikes (every year I think, as well as system meltdowns), Chilean earthquakes so on and so on…

I never however thought I would be caught up in this sort of serious scenario myself in the city I was living in. That is what happened to me in Christchurch on the 3rd September 2010 and 22nd February 2011 and became a daily part of my life for a good 3-4 years after with around 10000 earthquakes to deal with in that time period.

Kids skateboarding on a quake damaged car park.

One of the first earthquakes I ever experienced was on the 4th September 2010. I had just moved to Christchurch, New Zealand with my now wife in May of that year and was still starting to get setup in reality. I was rudely awoken at 4am in the morning with my wife screaming at me, I have to be honest I was inclined to roll back over and go to sleep as I was in a dream like state. Unfortunately the screaming was a bit too much and so I dragged myself out of bed but actually couldn’t stand easily. It was much like being on a small boat in rough seas, everything was moving around me in a blur as this massive wall of sound and rumbling went on for a good minute with a force of such violence I’ve never experienced ever before in my life.

Eventually it stopped and my wife told me it was an earthquake, it turned out this was 7.3 on the Richter scale when phone coverage came back up and we could get electricity back the next afternoon. The aftermath was pretty shocking and the devastation it caused but our house was fairly unscathed after that one.

I would rate the 3rd September 2010 as surreal rather than harrowing for us, altogether a very strange experience rather than particularly scary considering where we were at the time. The events of February 22nd 2011 however changed everything for everyone living in Christchurch at that time and for me as a person in many practical ways.

I was on facebook chatting to one of my friends in the UK at about 3pm when all hell broke loose. I had to drop my laptop and get out into our conservatory as I knew what was going on this time.

Basically my house was falling down behind me as well and this time, this 6.3 megaquake had struck practically underneath the centre of Christchurch and we were in the eye of the storm. We were in a semi detached house and little did I know that boulders as big as a large swiss-ball had landed in next doors back garden, metres from where I had been sitting from the cliff behind us. I also didnt know that even bigger boulders than this were dropping down on Redcliffs the other side of the hill from where we lived and people there were not as lucky as me. The roads were jam packed and my wife somehow got home early evening. We spent the evening huddled up in our sunroom/conservatory because our lounge wall had collapsed and this was as near to the front door as we could get and as far away from the cliffs. I for one spent a very sleepless night hoping there wouldn’t be more big shakes that might dislodge the cliff above us. Nonetheless we gathered what we could from the house and as soon as possible headed towards the relative sanctuary of my in laws north of the city. The house was “red zoned” soon after so we never went back in again.

The centre of Christchurch was obliterated that day, many of the places that I had frequented in my backpacking days and thereafter had totally collapsed. In fact I struggle to think of a single pub that I had been to in the centre of Christchurch that is still there to this day in its original form. 185 people lost their lives in the city and 1000s of people lost their homes and even now insurance claims arent settled for one reason or another.

We had literally 1000s of earthquakes before we packed our bags and left in 2015 but none as destructive as the two initial ones. People staying are very brave and resilient and I take my hat off to them,  as an Englishman through and through though, I yearned for home and steady ground beneath my feet.

I’ve learned lots of new words and experiences in the time since. “Munted” is a term for destroyed in CHCH which is now well recognized. Describing an earthquake as a “goodun” is another, which is the sort of gallows humour that evolved from being in such a stressful situation for so long.  My natural disaster experiences will be with me for the rest of my life, whenever I hear a road judder from a big lorry for example I still start a bit, expecting a “good un”.  I consider the experiences I have life changing but

Restart container city shopping centre, central Christchurch, an ingenious way to replace a wrecked city centre shopping area!

certainly not life stopping, we just got on with things the best we could after quite a few setbacks.

How does this all relate to travel you might ask? Well you see this is the sort of event that can effect travel plans. Earthquakes happen, strikes and computer glitches happen, its part of life but maybe not something that effects being at sea as much. Nonetheless setbacks happen and it is good to have a good travel consultant behind you at that point if you have any sort of holiday booked as well as atol and abta cover and a decent insurance plan. I even had a customer over in New Zealand last year when the Kaikoura earthquake happened, it was again a surreal experience helping someone on  the phone in the aftermath and just the familiarity of it all was strange for me. We found even more common ground than we already and help and advise I did, rearranging his flights and the self drive itinerary Id set up for him and also comparing earthquake notes which was interesting as its hard to find lots of people who have been through the same experience in the UK! I even got a bottle of wine as thanks when they got back to the UK and they had an amazing time for the rest of their NZ holiday despite the rather big setback and having to rearrange half the trip!

Everywhere around the world has events like above, its not something any place is totally immune from, even in the UK with flooding etc. In some ways a cruise is a good way to avoid this sort of thing as you are dipping in and out of place and if something like this is going on you can generally just move the ship on to somewhere else!