Warning: This story contains first-hand accounts of the Christchurch 2011 earthquake that may be distressing for some readers.
Those who were in Christchurch on 22 February 2011 all have a story to tell.
Some have probably told their stories many times to our friends and family - they've got used to them and they've come to define the day for them.
They're all talking about the same day - stories unfold simultaneously, they overlap - people cross paths and help each other.
Grant Cameron and his team had to use rope and other equipment to get out of their office building after the stairs collapsed Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon
Their accounts are all fragments of the same story - all little pieces of a bigger narrative - the story of a broken city.
RNZ marks 10 years since the major earthquake on 22 February 2011 with six-part podcast series Fragments, produced and presented by Christchurch-based journalist Katy Gosset.
The series brings together an archive of first-hand accounts recorded in the months following the devastating earthquake recorded by locals Julie Hutton and Sandra Close.
Ten years on, RNZ checked in with some of the survivors to reflect on their experiences.
How has surviving the quake changed the way they live?
Episode 5: The journeys
For many people, their accounts of 22 February 2011 are of movement; leaving town or travelling into town, trying to find family: children, partners, or simply to escape and get out of whatever situation they found themselves in.
Just getting around the city was a challenge to due the quake's impact on roads. Immediately afterwards, the city was gridlocked.
Many people ended up walking wherever they needed to go.
Two weeks after it hit, there were still major disruptions - 33 major roads totalling about 59km remained closed.
A month on, police said travel times around the city were twice as long as normal.
Some people were left without vehicles at all in the month following the quake. About 1400 cars were recovered from the city centre.
A 30km speed limit was put in place for the eastern suburbs to prevent further deterioration of the roads and to enable repairs to take place.
Civil Defence said there were 38,000 road defects that needed repairs.
Bus driver Anja Hansen was waiting to pick up a group of teachers at a meeting, then school children from an outing at the museum when the quake struck.
"Glass was just shattering over the bus, people screaming and it was quite surreal, actually."
Damage to the roads was so bad she couldn't get to the teachers, so she started working on getting to the children.
"Cars were just ... just everywhere, nobody was gonna let you around and, of course, people were just running and screaming and I really didn't wanna run anyone over."
What usually was a five-minute trip to the museum took half an hour - but the kids were there.
Upon arriving she got more than she bargained for: literally more children than she could handle.
"I think between the parents, the teachers, the kids, probably just over 100 and my bus is only a 39 seater."
With no other buses available, they all piled in and headed for their school.
"I didn't want the kids to see what had happened in town. I didn't know... I didn't want them to see if there were any bodies or anyone with, you know, that wasn't fair on them. So I chose the best route that would kinda keep us away from the sort of town area."
Then there were aftershocks.
"I think it was a 5.1 that hit and next minute the bus was just going from side to side.
"I slammed the doors shut so the parents wouldn't fall out the doors.
"And I had a car on either side of me and I was looking at the drivers and just this look of absolute horror on their faces as this bus was coming towards their cars from side to side. They... honestly, they must've thought they were gonna be crushed."
Three weeks after the quake Anja was diagnosed with cancer. Now, she's thrilled to say she's cancer free and that she found time to think about the day of the quake afterwards.
That's not to say she doesn't flinch when there's a tremor - and like a lot of people in Christchurch, feels like it's only a matter of time until there's another big shock.
"It feels like a waiting game," she says.
Anja doesn't feel like the quake changed her much. The cancer more so, she thinks. She received a Christchurch earthquake award for her services that day but doesn't want a fuss made about it - "it was for the sake of the kids".
Back on 22 February 2011, parents are desperately searching for their kids.
Liz Murray was at work in the BNZ building. Her journey - like others' - was on foot.
Once she made it outside, she thought immediately of her family and how she was going to get to them.
"The only thing I could think about that whole time when I was standing outside was, I need to walk. I need to walk... I just remember walking up the street and thinking, right, I've gotta get home. What's home going to be like?"
Traffic on the streets was bumper to bumper. At one point she ran over a bridge as fast as she could - she didn't want to be on it during an aftershock.
As she got closer to home, she saw students from her son's school.
"I stopped one of the boys and I said, 'Hey, what's happened to Shirley Boys?' ... and they said 'It's collapsed, it's really, really bad'."
"I remember just walking again thinking, 'okay, well, if I don't know what classroom he's in I'll take the dogs. I've got two little Jack Russells and they'll smell him. They'll find him and wherever he is and how ... and if he's trapped I'll dig him out. I'll just start digging and I won't stop'."
When she made it home, a neighbour reassured her that her son was okay.
"I went round the corner and there he was, you know, all of 14, hair all Beiber-like, standing at the corner of the house, on a shovel trying to help this man dig this car out that was sunk in the ground out the front and I just looked at him, you know, I just, oh, it was the best feeling."
Back in the CBD Grant Cameron was in his law firm's office on the sixth floor of the Forsyth Barr building.
As his staff gather in the immediate aftermath of the quake, one of his solicitors runs in.
"He said 'the stairs have gone' and none of us had twigged to this.
"And I said, 'You're kidding?'. He said, 'No, they're gone'... I bloody near died because half the landing has gone with them'."
With the stairs gone, his team's journey was about to begin. A relatively short one, distance wise - but challenging, and dangerous.
On one side of the building, car parking came up to level three.
"I thought, yeah, we could break a window, we could probably get out of here if we had to but what are we gonna use as ropes?"
They started preparing to use electrical cables. Then someone found a Civil Defence cabinet in another tenancy on the same floor containing rope and other equipment.
They rigged up a system to lower people down. The only question was - who first?
"We grabbed one of the solicitors who was fairly small of stature and said 'Right, you're number one'...
"And the system with two ropes, with two guys operating each rope and we'd worked out quickly how that would go, worked extremely well."
By the time there were just a couple of them left, a crane crew had arrived on the scene and helped them down.
"The very last package lowered was a full pack of Heineken," Grant says.
They'd decided they deserved a beer.
Grant's life since has been "chaotic, in a word".
It would be fair to say that work that came from the quake has overshadowed Grant's own experience of the day.
"We haven't had time to think of it very often."
Grant's practice was back on its feet within two weeks, which was good because the work was already there. He's spent the last 10 years helping people fight EQC or their insurers.
And all that means little time for self care or time away from work. Being nose down tail up for 10 years may have affected his health and his wife.
Grant remains critical of the recovery process and thinks more should have been done to stimulate business in Canterbury. Everyone has learned a lot of hard lessons about how life can change in an instant and how complex, stressful and often unending the insurance claims process can be. There needs to be better protection of peoples' rights, he says.
You can hear more about what life is like for quake survivors 10 years on by listening to Fragments Episode 5: The Journeys.
Fragments is written and presented by Katy Gosset and co-produced by Gosset and Justin Gregory. It's engineered by Alex Harmer and Rangi Powick. Video content by Nathan McKinnon. Tim Watkin is the executive producer of Podcasts and Series.
Thanks to Julie Hutton and Sandra Close for their work in recording interviews and to those who agreed to be re-interviewed by RNZ.
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