Michael Harford rescued seven people during the earthquake in Christchurch from the PGC building using his skills and gear as a lighting rigger for big concerts. He now runs an events company in Queenstown that features acrobatic performances.
Five years on from the Christchurch earthquake, incredible stories of bravery and courage are still emerging for the first time. Vicki Anderson shares the story of three strangers united forever by the events of that day.
THE DAY OF THE QUAKE
She runs towards him. It is just after 8pm on Tuesday, February 22, 2011, mere hours after the magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck Christchurch, killing 185 people and causing widespread damage across much of the New Zealand city. The two strangers hug. Silently the man and woman hold each other for more than a minute. Eventually the woman leans back and stares at the man's face. He is pale. Both of them are shivering. "I love you," she says emphatically. "I love you!"
On top of the collapsed PGC Building, an exhausted man is still searching for survivors. Looking down at the city sprawled beneath him like a broken jigsaw puzzle, he sees the two people hug. Something about their embrace is so poignant that five years later it is still etched in his memory.
And so began their life-long bond after a terror-filled day.
These are the events that led up to that moment.
THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 22, 2011
Natcoll House, Kilmore St:
Matty Lovell is going about his daily tasks as brand manager for The Rock radio station. As he sits in the production booth on the seventh floor, he thinks how glad he is that it has been a while since the city's last aftershock. It has been almost five months since Christchurch was woken by the magnitude 7.1 earthquake of September 4, 2010. He is relieved the aftershocks seemed to be weakening.
A home, somewhere in the suburb of Marshlands:It's after midday but Michael Harford is in bed, naked and asleep. As a stage lighting rigger, he's worked across Australasia on major shows for everything from international stars like Coldplay and the Rolling Stones to local ballet shows. He'd worked late the night before, setting up the stage rigging for American Pie singer Don McLean's concert at the Christchurch Town Hall.
But February made me shiver, with every paper I'd deliver, bad news on the doorstep, I couldn't take one more step. Singing bye bye Miss American Pie, the day the music died...
At the PGC building, Christchurch cbd:
Monique Mclennan looks out the window on the first floor of the PGC Building, where she works at Perpetual Trustees. She glances at her watch. It's exactly 12.50pm. She's spent the last hour internally debating whether to go for a run at 1pm but it's raining and she's hungry.
Thinking, "oh, screw it", she grabs her lunch out of her bag and walks the short distance to the cafeteria where three colleagues are already eating.
She puts her lunch, a leftover prawn dish cooked by her flatmate the night before, into the microwave.
PGC Building at 223 Cambridge Tce, before the February 22 earthquake. Photo: FAIRFAX NZ
12.51pm, the 6.3M earthquake hits:
As Monique presses the start button on the microwave it starts to make a funny sound. She thinks it is broken, but then the ground beneath her starts to shake. She is thrown violently and uncontrollably left and right. Just 5km deep and with peak ground acceleration reaching 2.2g at its epicentre, the quake would later be acknowledged as one of the greatest-ever ground accelerations in the world. Monique sees her colleagues, who have taken shelter together under the table. Suddenly a wall collapses towards her. Desperately she throws herself towards the table.
Despite her Superman-style dive, she doesn't make it. A door falls on her. Darkness descends. All Monique can hear is the roar of the earthquake and glass smashing as the building collapses around her.
Across town, Matty is standing in a doorway, looking down a hallway of the seven storey building. The earthquake strikes suddenly, forcing him to his knees. Young, fit and healthy, he is rendered defenceless and immobilised by the power of the tremor. He can see his girlfriend, Sally, and desperately wants to reach her, but it is physically impossible to move. Terror is reflected in his colleagues' eyes. The office lights flicker in and out of darkness.
Woken by a freight train of noise in his bedroom, Michael feels like he isn't moving but everything else is. He feels as if he is levitating. Within seconds he is standing outside, naked, watching the trees around him writhe and the ground beneath his feet undulate.
Less than a minute after it begins, the shaking stops.
An aerial view of the collapsed PGC Building taken a week after the earthquake. Photo: GRANT ARMISHAW
In the darkness Monique feels something heavy on her back cutting into her merino top. The pressure is growing. Her legs, tingling hot with pins and needles, are lying straight but her head is somehow just centimetres from her knees.
She is struggling to breathe. Each intake of air is a mammoth effort. There will be an aftershock any moment and she knows she needs to move but she can't move. Other people near her are making frightening noises and she can tell they're in a bad way.
As the noise of the rumbling fades and the shaking stops. Matty can hear fearful people yelling and swearing.
Near him a woman looks out the window and screams "look at Christchurch". Matty watches dust rise from around the collapsing city so fast that within seconds of her words, the enormous dust cloud has travelled up past their seventh storey window.
Matty runs to check on Sally and tells her to go as other people start to run towards the stairs.
In suburban Marshlands, Michael quickly dresses and runs across a paddock to the family business to check on his mother. She is fine, but pale, and is being comforted by her colleagues.
12.53pm:
Trapped in the PGC Building the "Cafeteria Five" quickly establish their perilous situation. Unable to see around them, they conclude that the roof has caved in.
Monique knows if she is to have any chance of survival she has to move her legs out from underneath her. She is convinced she will have to break her own leg.
"The weird thing is, there was no if, there was just I had to move or be crushed. I could only bend one leg, I wasn't sure if I was going to have to break it or dislocate it, that's how bad it was. If you had felt the weight on my back you would understand why there was no indecision."
Moving her legs free, without needing to break them, she can breathe easier, albeit surrounded by masses of dust. She can see more clearly now but this relief quickly turns to terror. Her legs are sheltering under a school-type metal chair, both legs up on a set of drawers, her head inside half a recycling bin. The tiny school chair is all that stands between her and a giant concrete beam.
Matty checks the radio station's remaining offices for people. There is a deserted, airy feeling when he looks back at the trashed offices. The lights out, together he and radio announcer Sue White navigate their way down seven flights of stairs by the shivers of sunlight that peek through cracks in the concrete.
1.30pm:
Trapped in the darkness, one of the Cafeteria Five has found her cellphone and worked out that there is a gap between her and Monique's foot that it can be squeezed through. But Monique is initially too terrified to move to reach the phone.
Outside on the street a girl tells Matty that people have died as she points at the PGC Building. Around him, people are scrambling to leave the city, the roads in chaos.
As part of his rigging certificate, Michael has a licence to perform high risk work. He borrows his mum's 4WD and grabs his rigging kit, hard hat, shovel and high-vis. Maybe I can help, he thinks.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON
In the cafeteria there had been a morning tea for one of Monique's colleagues. It was her last day at work before she was to be married that weekend. Now the leftover cakes lay on the floor covered in dust amid the debris. In the rubble Monique finds two bottles of cider which she manages to pass to someone else using just the tips of her fingers in the tiniest of spaces.
Monique's legs are both up on a set of drawers. Scared, she moves her head outside of the recycling bin so that it is positioned under the chair.
Now Monique believes she is going to die.
In a carpark Matty hugs Sally. He is in shock. Around him is people are running, screaming, crying or yelling. The sound of alarms echoes through the streets and silt, the result of liquefaction, bubbles up through cracks in the flooded roads.
With a colleague, Matty grabs hard hats, hi-vis vests and a crow bar and runs around the inner city, into offices and shops looking for places where people might need help. They walk past the PGC Building that has been compressed from a multi-storey building to just one. People are walking around covered in blood, crying and disoriented.
He walks on, with his friend Dan, to High Street where a policeman chucks them a can of spray paint and asks them to help check that buildings are clear.
The pair take it in turns. One enters the building, looking for trapped or injured people while the other waits outside for the all clear signal. They do this at more than a dozen shops, offices, a dentist's surgery and a tattoo parlour.
On the corner of High and Manchester Streets Matty sees a dead woman. Someone has covered her with AstroTurf. It's a sight that he will never forget.
They get to Cathedral Square. They are the only people there. They walk towards the flattened Christ Church Cathedral where the fallen spire lies on the ground. It feels symbolic.
On Colombo Street stands a lone policeman. Around him are the bodies of people who have been killed by the falling masonry of the street's shops. Some of the dead look as though they are just sleeping.
A dead woman's cellphone rings and Matty goes to answer it. He feels terrible that he, a stranger, knows the woman's fate when her loved ones do not. But the policeman shouts at him to stop, nothing can be touched. He looks sadly at Matty and says that the phone hasn't stopped ringing for the 30 minutes he's been there.
Matty walks on until he finds himself back at the PGC Building. The only non-fireman there, he is directed to work with a rescue crew on top of the building.
A woman is rescued from the PGC Building, Cambridge Terrace, after the earthquake on February 22, 2011. Photo: RICHARD COSGROVE/FAIRFAX NZ
A firefighter grabs Matty by the shirt and nearly lifts him up off the ground.
"I'll never forget it. He pulls me up to his eyes and, staring at me, says 'don't get yourself into a position where you need to be rescued, be smart'."
When Michael sees the PGC Building his heart sinks. He parks his car, puts on his high-vis and starts walking towards the pancaked building just as one of the fire units pulls in. He approaches a fireman on site and explains that he's there to help.
"I told him I'd worked with cranes, I had some engineering knowledge and I knew the layout of the building as my sister had previously worked there."
The head of Urban Search and Rescue appears. He recognises Michael and says "let's go around the back of the building".
RESCUING THE CAFETERIA FIVE
Waiting to die, Monique's life flashes before her eyes.
The expression is a cliche but it is what she saw. As the 22-year-old lies there, trapped, she becomes increasingly hysterical, breathing in so much dust she thinks she will end up with "black lung like Zoolander's".
She expects to die at any second. As she waits for death, every stage of her life plays over in her mind. After that came regret. Regret that she would never say goodbye to those she loved. Regret that she would never get to do things she thought she would do.
She begins to fall apart. She tries to call and text a friend, yelling the phrase she would yell for nearly eight hours: "There are five of us, we are in the cafeteria in the PGC Building on the first floor, please send help."
As each of the many aftershocks hits, her hair is torn out on a jagged object. She shuts her eyes, clenches her fist and experiences pure terror.
The beam moves and the legs on the chair sheltering her begin to buckle. Thinking her death is imminent, Monique makes a call to her grandma.
Monique: "Grandma, I'm stuck under a chair in the PGC Building. I just wanted to call to say I love you."
Grandma: "Ooooh, hello dear. I was wondering how you were going. Did you feel the earthquake?"
Monique: "Grandma, I have to go now, I love you."
Nearby she can hear a man groaning in agony. Later someone would tell her that the noises she heard were from a man whose legs were amputated using just a hacksaw and a penknife.
But a voice is comforting him. Hope returning, Monique calls to him. The man replies: "Help is coming shortly, hang in there."
Meanwhile, on the roof, Matty is helping to make a space big enough for a stretcher to fit through. A fireman had confirmed that three or more people were trapped in one section and one person in another. The cafeteria five. These rescuers are going in from the top while another team works elsewhere.
Matty Lovell helped dig a hole in the roof of the collapsed PGC Building to rescue people trapped after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Photos: MATTY LOVELL
All they have to work with is a sledge hammer and a long steel crow bar. Matty picks up the hammer and begins hitting the line the fireman had drawn on the 8in thick reinforced concrete. He alternates hits with another man using the bar. It's a slow process. After 45 minutes the hole is "maybe 6 feet square" and Matty's hands are bleeding.
Out the back of the building, Michael finds a fire engine, equipment being laid out on tarpaulins and ladders being put up against the crushed building.
"The head of USAR said 'good luck'. You give each other a bit of a look without saying anything. You curl your lip up, you nod. He left me with a group of firefighters out the back of the building."
Grabbing a torch, he walks around surveying the damage.
He sees some graphic things. People with serious injuries and people who had been killed.
After working for some time to help free a man who has his foot trapped under a beam, Michael hands him to a firefighter like "human pass the parcel".
"I remember the look that the freed man gave me. Those looks, people connecting to each other and not saying anything but the looks of fear, appreciation... without saying anything you can understand what someone's saying to you through a very powerful expression. That was comforting, I felt very proud. I thought, 'right that's one, who's next'?"
Several floors had collapsed in on each other leaving just tiny gaps and holes for rescuers. Three firefighters look at Michael like 'what do we do now?' They spend an hour or two digging out material from the second and third level, throwing stuff off the side of the building.
At this point two firefighters leave the site.
"I remember one specifically saying 'I don't know if I can deal with this, I'm not trained for this', recalls Michael. "I remember thinking 'none of us are trained for anything like this'. The other firefighter who left was a bit older, he had a wife and kids. He said 'I can't be here'. I agreed with him."
Information came through that there had been cellphone activity from the trapped Cafeteria Five.
By this time Matty is part of a crew going in from the roof, with another crew working from inside the stairwell. Michael decides to try another access point. He climbs to the top of a ladder and into a tiny hole and turns around to see who is with him.
Right behind him is Mark, an 18-year-old firefighter.
With Michael leading the way, they crawl through the confined space, through an office with just one metre of space between the first and second floors. Michael opens a desk cupboard, squeezes through the back of it and through a broken wall into the next room. There are wires and metal in their path. Using just wire cutters and hacksaws the pair dig a tunnel through the debris.
A small aftershock hits and Michael hears people screaming.
"I got an extra push. I started digging and punching through walls, I was using my fist, my knuckles were bleeding. Mark gave me a hammer and said quite drily, 'here try this'. I made a hole in the wall and I could hear them very clearly and I knew they were in that space. I made a big enough hole to get a torch through and passed it to them. It was quite a weird scenario.
"One of the girls yelled out 'are you a cute firefighter?' I remember replying saying 'sorry no, I'm not a firefighter but the young fella behind me is and he's single'. There were a few giggles and you could hear their morale pick up a bit. I could hear the hammers going two or three floors above us."
Matty, working above Michael, breaks through the roof.
Matty Lovell helped dig a hole in the roof of the collapsed PGC Building to rescue people trapped after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Photo: MATTY LOVELL
A human chain on the roof moves the debris until it is thrown off the side of the building. Then the person at the bottom of the hole yells for survivors, everyone stays quiet and waits to see if there is a response.
"We carried on and on digging, by now there were maybe 10 people helping and as the hole got deeper only one or two people could fit in a time, so we did 3–4 minutes shifts going 100% for that time then swapping out," says Matty. "Every time we found a survivor and pulled them out, a huge cheer would go up, and we would high five each other. On the contrary whenever we found a body an equally sombre feeling would circulate."
Then, with no warning just under two hours after the big earthquake, a magnitude 5.9 aftershock strikes.
It rips away Monique's hopes of being rescued and she becomes hysterical with fear.
The chair above her is severely buckling under the strain of the beam and the pressure on her back has increased.
"All my hope was gone."
Matty finds a wallet strewn among the personal belongings on the roof. Inside it there is a quote from Sir Peter Blake talking about "not giving up". It reinvigorates him.
Michael is confined to the tiny tunnel he'd dug in the rubble. As the aftershock hits and the crushed building shakes, the hole he's made starts getting smaller around him.
"I was determined. I remember looking down at a bit of carpet and saying 'no, this is not going to happen to me today, I'm here to help people'. I knew I had a job to do."
The Cafeteria Five are screaming and crying. He tries to reassure them.
There is a fridge in the cafeteria that has been compacted down to just the size of a freezer compartment. Michael rips off a piece with his bare hands and burrows through the space in the side of the fridge and finds four people on the other side.
"The first thing that happened was I got offered a plate of dusty cookies. I said 'thanks but no thanks and get out'. One poor lady, I don't know where she came from, she came out under the table and she moved so fast, she was under my arm and gone down that tunnel like a little rabbit."
Another girl can also move and he sends her down the hole towards the ladder.
That leaves three people, including Monique, to be rescued.
Monique Mclennan, was one of the Cafeteria 5 rescued from the PGC Building in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. She now lives in Hamilton and is pursuing her love of pin-up under the name Monique Sweet. Photo: STEVEN BAKER PHOTOGRAPHY
Monique is wedged between the legs of a chair, with her legs up on a set of drawers. She is holding the set of drawers because she thinks they are going to collapse. Michael rips the front off a drawer and she can move more. He instructs her how to contort her legs and torso until she is free.
"It was just in time, the chair legs were buckling. It looked like it was going to collapse any second. She was so scared she couldn't move so I had to crawl backwards out of the tunnel with her looking into my eyes. As we went I brushed glass out of the way so she wouldn't hurt her knees. I talked her out the whole way. I got her to the ladder and handed her to the fireman."
Monique is one of seven people Michael rescues that day.
"I was told it was seven, I can't remember if it was six or seven," he says. "Mostly I just remember the person I wasn't able to help."
EVENING DESCENDS
Around 8pm:
Reaching a trapped man, Michael realises he needs medical help that he cannot offer. He is out of his depth. He passes on the information to the USAR team.
Covered in dust and bleeding from his knees and hands, Michael knows that after the last seven hours or so he needs a break.
He walks across the street where he sees family members waiting anxiously for news of their loved ones.
"It really hits me in the heart."
Walking back out towards the building to head home, he sees Monique running towards him. She is crying and screaming.
"I was numb. I could feel myself going pale. She gave me the most appreciative hug. We stood there for a minute just hugging and holding each other."
Exhausted, cold and covered in dust, Matty sees two people hug.
"She was crying and she hugged the man who rescued her with the most sincere, honest and true hug I had ever seen," he says. "I don't know how to explain it, but he saved her life, and that hug seemed to justify her gratitude for doing so. I will never forget that."
A NEW LIFE STARTS HERE
Monique's job was disestablished shortly after the earthquake. Three months later she was diagnosed with acute PTSD. She still wrestles with anxiety. A major trigger is feeling anything heavy on her back. She now lives in Hamilton and works in marketing for Livingstone Building NZ. She is also living her dream, as a well known pin-up personality working with Very Vintage TV and Glory Days Magazine. She recently got engaged to her partner, Sam.
Monique Mclennan, was one of the Cafeteria 5 rescued from the PGC Building in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. She now lives in Hamilton and is pursuing her love of pin-up under the name Monique Sweet. Photo: STEVEN BAKER PHOTOGRAPHY
"The chair is the thing I wanted to take out of the building with me. It was one of those school chairs. I told my partner, our house is going to be full of these."
She and Michael have kept in touch. They have supported each other through some dark times and each of the earthquake anniversaries.
"Michael is an average Joe who risked his life for me, a complete stranger. He gave me my life," says Monique. "He did what no-one else there was prepared to do. He is a truly humble hero. I nominated him for a bravery award and I raged until he got one, nearly two years after the quake."
Now she lives her life with no regrets.
"There is pre-quake Monique and post-quake Monique, that's how I think of it. I used to worry about what people thought of me and I tried to blend in. Now I'm the person in the room wearing the brightest clothes. I want to live my life on fast forward because I know what it's like to not have a future."
Inside a bag of earthquake possessions – the clothes and shoes she was wearing that day – that she keeps at her grandmother's Christchurch house is the green body tag Monique was given after she was rescued.
Read her account of that day on her blog Mumptystyle.co.m
The body tag Monique Mclennan was given when she was rescued from the PGC Building after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
Matty and Sally were married last month, 10 days before the fifth anniversary of the earthquake. They believe in #experiencesnotthings and have spent four years post-quake travelling the world together.
"It was a very significant day that I feel strongly connected to emotionally. I saw things you never expect you'd see in your lifetime," he says. "I believe whether they are good or bad our experiences define us. It's a part of me now, and who I am today. It sounds like a cliche but I try not to take things for granted any more. The earthquake reminded us just how fragile life is. We have a lot to be thankful for that sometimes we forget to appreciate. Life is about relationships and experiences – I try to appreciate both now more than ever."
One woman he rescued spent eight hours trapped beside the torso of a dead colleague. He thinks about her often.
"I got asked to do a lot of interviews after the earthquake but said no because I was nervous they would just try to make me out as a hero, which, to be honest is very embarrassing as so many people did similar things I did that day. I just want to help people and I hope me sharing my story can do that."
Matty has never been publicly acknowledged for his bravery that day. Read his account on Tumblr.
Matty and Sally Lovell on their honeymoon in Africa this month. Here they are pictured in front of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. After the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, the pair have travelled extensively, favouring #experiencesnotthings. Photo: MATTY LOVELL
Michael now lives in Queenstown where he runs an entertainment business, VIP Entertainment Ltd and Gravity, a aerial and aerobatic training studio with his partner, Sarah Jane.
He describes himself as "utterly devoted" to Sarah Jane. He doesn't rush through life like he used to, now he likes to stop and admire the view.
This is the first time he has told his story. It wasn't easy for him.
The following understated line is from the bravery award he received in 2012: "Michael James Harford rescued several persons from collapsed PGC Building at great risk to his own safety".
Matty, Michael and Monique agreed to speak about their experiences in the hope that people would read this story and understand how precious their own life is.
"The regular Joes like myself... the people who were just there helping, doing what they could that day, I can't thank them all enough," says Michael. "They are all special, unreal people... coming together to do that for people they didn't know.
"It shows you how much beauty there is in humanity."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/77971700/christchurch-earthquake-survivors-epic-tale-he-gave-me-my-life
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