| |
The earthquake that swallowed up the West family devastated Grantville. Buildings had fallen, glass and rubble strewed the streets. Grantville was cut off to the South, where Christchurch lay, while to the North, Blenheim and Nelson hospitals' facilities were limited but available. A steady flow of helicopters ferried people to Christchurch hospital while ambulances drove two and a half hours north to Nelson and Blenheim or to the ferries in Picton to take the injured across Cook Strait to Wellington.
One of the worst hit buildings was Grantville Hospital. The structure was only a few years old and should have been among the strongest in the land but all eight floors pancaked on to the ground floor. Although the hospital was relatively quiet during the holiday period, with many staff on leave, the majority of deaths occurred at that site.
Also badly hit was the police station. This was a more modest building comprising two reinforced concrete two storey extensions to an existing wooden building that housed most of the records. Windows were broken, ceilings fell down and doors jammed. As a result of broken pipes, some record rooms were flooded but there were no injuries or deaths.
Barbara van Buren got under her desk as soon as the room began to shake. She knew to hold the legs of the desk but the movement was so severe she felt her wrists would break if she held on any longer. Her computer flew from the desk and crashed to the floor, narrowly missing her legs. A water cooler went bouncing down the space between the rows of desks.
The earthquake registered 7.8 on the Richter scale. It lasted for two minutes, a very long time for any shake. The air roared with the sound of a hundred diesel trucks then fell silent as the shake rolled away. The room was silent apart from the moans and screams of the injured. Barbara was one of the first on her feet. In the absence of any senior officers Barbara took control of the situation, calling on those not seriously injured to come to her desk, a task for which she was later commended. Five officers and two civilians lined up. Barbara was mildly amused as she had expected people to crowd around her desk.
Monday was her first day back after taking compassionate leave to marry. Some welcome home! She gave orders to assess the injured and label the site where they lay with red, yellow or green marker pens, of which her desk held a large number as a result of her squirreling pens away in her drawer. Those labelled yellow were to have the highest priority when medical services arrived. Those labelled green were less badly injured but were not able to move on their own. The red was to be used for the dead, whose bodies were to be left for undertakers. Fortunately, in the police building, there were no people classed as red, but there were two cases of serious injury and a collection of broken bones and cuts, especially to faces.
With the triage finished and the injured receiving assistance, Barbara turned her attention to incoming calls. Because warranted officers were needed on the street, she had to use civilians to man the communications. This meant that serious decisions were referred to her.
Her heart stopped when a message from a truck driver, Brendan Geddes described a Toyota being swallowed up by a landslide. Barbara knew the Wests were going home to Weatherston that day because she had talked with Alex West and wished her a safe journey.
She had a note on her desk, Toyota LLM446. Geddes, Brendan witness. Feeling sick with the uncertainty of her thoughts, Barbara asked one of the civilians to please find the truck driver on the bypass road, the Brendan Geddes who had seen a car carried away in a mud slide.