Christchurch Retailers Rally

This week’s earthquake in Christchurch is likely to have serious long-term consequences for all businesses in the area with the full reality of the scale of the clean up starting to hit home.

Frequent visitor to the ‘shaky isles’ Bill McCurry sent a call out to all the Christchurch photo retailers checking in to see how they fared.

The responses, fortunately, was that everyone seems to have come through with their businesses in reasonably good shape and they are now busily picking up the pieces and seeing what business they can generate.

Popular Christchurch retailer Laurie Hanafin was fortunate in that his store survived any major damage but his beautiful home was severely damaged.

I know we all send him our best wishes.

Always one to look on the positive side Chris Wilkinson from First Retail stated that “It's a time that could push memories - and fragility of digital images - to the fore.” – and that may lead to business opportunities.

Add to that the fact that many business will need to either replace POS marketing materials or generate all new ‘Quake Sale’ POS which could lead to opportunities for those with wide format capabilities.

Greg’s Photo Video reported “Well we have had one heck of a weekend here in this city. There is massive damage around the older buildings in the CBD, and also to about 100,000 homes in various parts of the city and outlying districts. Amazingly !!! there has been NO LOSS of LIFE. There have been some really miraculous escapes and quite a few injuries of various levels. However the city is today really just getting to grips with the aftermath of the event as we open up on our Monday morning. We are actually up and running in the lab even our chemistry survived the quake. We have had about sixty aftershocks and today had about twelve since midnight. Some of those around 5.1. So we are all well and safe and the folk of this city have shown truly how to pull together and help each other out. Water and sewage are out in most places and that will be the main priorities over coming days. We are still under civil emergency law but all is rather relaxed at the moment. All in all an amazing result. Cheers everyone.”

Lab & Photo gave the following commentary “The engineers are working through the days and evenings checking out buildings. Many of the older parts of our block are written off, but the actual Mall is OK and was certified last night. We have water again here and the toilets are cleared to use in this part of the city, so when you are in the shop you would not know the devastation just outside, literally 20 paces away.

As far as I am aware the other Fuji labs are ok. Our main concern was minlabs falling over and chemistry slopping across tanks. Seems we all survived OK. Fuji NZ were on the phone early ready to put a team together to come down and replace chemistry. I don't think it was required but good on them for the effort.

Had some really good strong aftershocks during the night. If you want to see what's happening log onto "www.geonet.co.nz " the logs make interesting reading.

A couple of staff have damaged houses and one of our customers is seriously injured in ICU in hospital. Some others have lost their homes.

The real seriousness of this event will only start to sink in over the next couple of weeks, as we start to be able to move around the city again. One of the most damaging aspects has been the liquification effect which has sunk so many items and come up through the ground to destroy roads, house foundations, buildings etc. Many lampposts are now standing only a few meters above ground. A few cars have just sunk into the ground, some kids have lost their bikes as the sand volcanoes erupted all over their gardens, it just goes on and on.

Hey thanks for thinking of us over here. It makes a difference you know. The shock is starting to sink in a little.

Cheers for now,

Julian

I know Garth Burleigh, Director of PMA New Zealand is rallying the forces in New Zealand and will reach out if there is anything we can do from this end.

We wish everyone the very best with a rapid clean up and a quick return to business.