CTV collapse candlelight vigil: 13 years on families of victims want 'accountability'

Julie Abraham has a quiet moment of reflection at the vigil. Photo: RNZ

The daughter of a woman killed in the Canterbury Television building collapse says 13 years on families are still waiting for justice.

Julie Abraham lost her mother Heather Marilyn Meadows when the six-storey CTV building collapsed in the earthquake on 22 February, 2011.

She organised a candlelight vigil at the former site of building on the eve of the anniversary with Srecko Cvetanov, whose wife Dr Tamara Cvetanov was among the 115 killed.

A candle was lit for each of the victims by friends, family and strangers.

Christchurch City Councillor Yani Johansen (L) and vigil organiser Julie Abraham (R) light candles together. Photo: RNZ

Meadows was a former army nurse originally from Bath, England.

"She had a cheeky smile, she'd talk the pants off you, even if she was at the bus stop. She loved going second-hand shopping and getting bargains," Abraham said.

Meadows, 66, had been in the CTV building for a doctor's appointment when the earthquake struck.

"She thought she would get there early to make sure she got seen [by the doctor], and she did get seen. She just couldn't get out," Abraham said.

Kim Annan with the roses taken from the plant that grew on the CTV site post-quake. She brings some back every year on the anniversary in a vase with Stephen's name inscribed on the bottom. Photo: RNZ

Kim Annan lost her best friend, Stephen Wright in the CTV collapse.

He was the marketing manager of the television station, and his family had gifted Annan the watch he was wearing when he died.

She also took living momentos from the site before it was replanted.

"I took a rose bush and a rosemary plant. Stephen loved roses, Stephen taught me how to prune roses so roses were his thing."

"Every year, I cut flowers off it and I bring it down on earthquake day, these red roses," Annan said.

While the vigil offered a chance of reflection, it also served as a way to vent frustration at the absence of any formal accountability over the building's collapse.

A 2012 Royal Commission of Inquiry found engineer David Harding made fundamental errors in designing the building and it criticised his boss Alan Reay for handing sole responsibility for the design over to somebody so inexperienced.

"We've still never had any justice for what happened here. All of us know that the building should never have been built," Annan said.

"There's been no accountability for our loved ones. I'm here for my mum, I'm her voice," Abraham said.

"We don't want this to happen again. We don't want anyone else to go through what we've been through."

The families still hadn't had an apology from Reay himself, Abraham said.

Kim Annan (centre) lights a candle for Stephen Wright with other friends and family members. Photo: RNZ

54 family members and the Ministry of Building, Innovation and Employment's chief engineer made complaints about both men to their professional body, Engineering New Zealand (ENZ) in 2012.

The ENZ Disciplinary Committee heard the complaint against Reay last December before reserving its findings, which were due out in April.

Police had not pressed charges in relation to the collapse.

Christchurch City Councillor Yani Johanson was among the candle lighters at the vigil. He used to work in the CTV building before becoming a councillor.

"I always had a really strong, close connection to the staff who worked at the building. In local media, everyone sort of knows everyone, especially if you've been around for a while," he said.

Johanson represented the area where the CTV building stood when the earthquake hit, often coming into the studio he used to host out of for interviews and seeing friends who still worked there.

"It's a huge sense of loss and grief, especially the young ones that were just starting out in life," he said.

The city still carried visible scars from the earthquakes too.

"Today at council, ironically, we were just talking about the permanent rebuild of the Pages Road bridge, the lifeline bridge going out to New Brighton. Anyone who's been out there will just know that it's absolutely depressing that we've still got munted infrastructure sitting there languishing," Johanson said.

The social impact of the disaster wasn't lost on him either.

"Sadly, if you look around the inner city, what you see is very expensive housing, you see a gentrification of the people who didn't have a lot of money, of wealth, essentially being pushed further and further east [out of the CBD]," he said.

But on the whole, most people he spoke to were positive about the direction Christchurch was heading in, and the spaces that had been created in the last 13 years were beautiful, Johanson said.

Auckland University property professor, Olga Filippova said unoccupied sites and buildings in a poor state were acting as barriers to the city's regeneration.

A group of derelict buildings in the CBD had been nicknamed the "dirty 30" for their unkempt appearance.

Emergency legislation helped address short and mid-term recovery but new laws were needed to give the council the power to take action against uncooperative land owners who still had vacant sites or buildings that had fallen into disrepair, Filippova said.

"This should be combined with a comprehensive survey of the local governments' current recovery management capabilities," she said.

A small civic ceremony will be held to remember the 185 victims of the quakes at the Oi Manawa Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial on the banks of the Ōtākaro Avon River.

It will begin at 12.45pm with the reading of the names of the victims, followed by a moment of silence at 12.51pm, when the earthquake struck.