CHRISTCHURCH, Feb 22 (Kyodo/APP): The New Zealand city of Christchurch on Sunday marked the 15th anniversary of the devastating 2011 earthquake that claimed 185 lives and injured thousands.
Some 115 of the victims died in the collapse of the six-story Canterbury Television Building when the magnitude 6.3 temblor struck, including 28 Japanese studying English at a language school on the building’s third floor.
A memorial service for bereaved families was held at Avonhead Memorial Cemetery on Sunday morning, followed by a public service at the Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial, where attendees observed a minute’s silence at 12:51 p.m. to mark the moment the quake struck on Feb. 22, 2011.
The parents of Yuko Hirabayashi, a midwife from Shiga Prefecture who died in the CTV building collapse aged 28, visited Christchurch for the anniversary for the first time in several years.
Speaking to Kyodo News after the service, her mother, Chizuru Hirabayashi, 67, said she is not sure when they will next be able to come, as they are getting older. “We wanted to visit at this milestone and draw a line under things. We want to honor our daughter, who lived boldly and briefly,” she said.
Kazuo and Seiko Horita from Japan’s Toyama Prefecture, whose daughter Megumi also died in the collapse aged 19, visited Christchurch for the first time in two years for the anniversary.
After the service, they visited the memorial erected on the former site of the CTV building and left a letter addressed to their daughter.
“15 years have passed, but she was only 19. We only knew her as that child up until then, so time stands still for us,” Seiko Horita, 66, told Kyodo News. “Yet in another four years, it will be the full span of her life. Thinking about that, I can’t tell if it feels long or short.”
Speaking to Kyodo News on Sunday, Christchurch Mayor Phil Mauger said the city has learned a lot from the disaster, constructing more earthquake-resilient buildings and establishing an emergency operations center for greater inter-agency coordination in the event of a future disaster.
But 15 years on from the quake, frustration remains for some bereaved families over the ongoing fight for justice after numerous delays.
Maan Alkaisi, the spokesman for the CTV Families Group, told Kyodo News ahead of the anniversary that “the story of the CTV building will never end until justice is done.”
Alkaisi, 75, lost his wife, Maysoon Abbas, in the collapse, and has been campaigning for justice ever since.
“It’s been a long time since this happened, but it’s still hurting us after all these years,” said Alkaisi, as legal battles drag on over an attempt by the country’s professional body for engineers to hold to account the owner of the engineering firm who designed the building, Alan Reay, for the structural deficiencies blamed for its collapse.
In 2024, an Engineering New Zealand disciplinary committee upheld a longstanding complaint against Reay, finding that he knew the employee who designed the building lacked the necessary experience to do so, and had failed to provide adequate supervision despite this knowledge.
The committee ordered that Reay be admonished, fined NZ$750 ($445) and pay costs of $1,000 related to resolving the complaint — the maximum amounts under the body’s rules at the time the building was constructed.
While the decision brought some satisfaction for Alkaisi and other bereaved families, he said it was not the satisfaction of holding Reay legally responsible.
Despite identifying “significant deficiencies” in the building’s design during their investigation, police in 2017 decided not to pursue criminal prosecution on the advice of the government’s legal advisers, citing a lack of evidence to secure a conviction.
Reay has requested a judicial review of the disciplinary committee’s decision, but a hearing has yet to be scheduled after further delays caused by disputes over the disclosure of documents for the matter.