TVNZ's Mark Crysell catches up with the man who memorably featured on our cover a year ago.
David Horsley in Latimer Square, photo Getty Images
The earth may have exploded with devastating violence, and buildings may have disintegrated into deadly ruins, but think about the Christchurch earthquake and it’s the faces you remember.
David Horsley’s face – stunned, bloodied and bandaged – ended up on the cover of the Listener. “I don’t know how long I sat there in Latimer Square,” he says. “I don’t know when the picture was taken.”
Remarkably, despite standing right next to the lift shaft of the CTV Building when the quake struck, Horsley escaped with just five stitches on each side of his head. “As the building shook and as it seemed to rise up, I looked up to my left, and as the building seemed to come down again, I thought I saw the wall separate from the ceiling and I could see through, and at that point the debris started to fall on me.”
He was convinced he was going to die. “I looked at it quite cold-heartedly. I didn’t panic because it was beyond my control. Death was quite easy – it only takes a moment.” But somewhere underneath that smouldering ruin of twisted steel and concrete were 21 students the New Zealander had brought to Christchurch from Toyama, Japan, for a three-week intensive language course. “I had the list of students in my hand. If you look at the photo I’m actually holding the list of students.” He had just sent a series of text messages to Toyama. The first said: “Brace yourselves.”
Under the rubble, some of the trapped and terrified Kings Education students were using their cellphones to call their parents and school back in Japan. Horsley grabbed a firefighter. “I told him, ‘You’ve got to tell your superiors and the people back at the site, the CTV Building, that there are survivors. I know there are survivors, you’ve got to start digging.’” But 13 of the 21 Toyama students never came out of the CTV Building alive, and some escaped only after limbs were amputated.
Horsley describes those who died as “exuberant” and “full of life”. A group photo, taken on his cellphone in the Botanic Gardens the day before the quake, is one of the few reminders of the happy start to the trip. It was meant to be the beginning of a three-week tour. Instead, the death of so many of its young people so far from home has devastated Toyama, a quiet city of nearly half a million people about 300km northwest of Tokyo.
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Horsley has lived here for 23 years. The flatness of the city, with its mountain range on the horizon and closeness to the coast, reminds him of Christchurch, where he went to university. He had been looking forward to taking his class there. “I was going to show off: ‘This is New Zealand; this is Canterbury; this is Christchurch; this is what we do and this is our way of life. I’m proud of this; I’m bringing you to a safe building in a safe city in a safe country.’” Instead he returned to Toyama and attended 12 funerals. Some of the parents blamed the school for sending their children to Christchurch so soon after the September quake.
“I feel terribly, terribly badly about what has happened and I feel terribly badly for the families who have lost their children. But there’s no way that any of us could have known that – that in a sense we were heading into a kind of a perfect storm; that we had to go to Christchurch just as that earthquake was going to happen; that we had to be in that particular building; and that we had to be in that particular building at that particular time. It’s insane.”
Mark Crysell and his crew travelled to Toyama with the assistance of the Asia Foundation. Their story about the Japanese victims screened on TV1’s Sunday programme on February 19, and is available here.