Canterbury's Long Road Back

Canterbury's Long Road Back

A month after the second earthquake that devastated Christchurch, the city’s businesses are picking up the pieces. For Greentree’s partners and clients there are several priorities: heading the list are paying staff wages, keeping track of money owing, and getting new business through the door.

One of our partners, Endeavour Solutions [www. endeavour.co.nz], is based out at Riccarton and its premises escaped major damage. But with communications down and roads gridlocked, Director Tim Ryley faced the dilemma (once all his staff were accounted for and evacuated) of contacting his clients to see how they were faring and what assistance they required.

“We assembled a list of the clients that we felt would have been affected because they were in areas either in the inner city or out to the eastern side of the city, where all the damage was,” he says. “We identified, produced a list of those clients and then contacted most of them, but that in itself was difficult because your systems for contacting your clients are based around their business phone numbers mainly, and of course they’re either (a) not there or (b) their phones aren’t working.”

Diligent work with cell phones finally established that most clients’ staff were okay, but that their businesses – as expected – were a mess. In several cases their buildings were severely damaged or even destroyed. Some bear the red tags that indicate they may have to be demolished. Six of Endeavour’s clients have had to find new premises.

One lost all its data and therefore its current position at the time of the quake; it required Endeavour to restore older backups of its software and has since had to do its best to catch up manually.

Many Christchurch businesses were able to resume work fairly promptly; those who were able to access their vital data remotely were the luckiest. It is known that a few whose servers were trapped in damaged buildings (and who shall remain nameless) risked arrest under the emergency laws to enter the city’s no-go zone and retrieve their servers – it was either that or face severe hardship. Among those hit hard was the Christchurch Casino, a Greentree client and one of the city’s biggest single employers (more than 500 staff). The casino itself suffered structural damage, and its administration offices in another building are inaccessible inside the disaster cordon.

For most companies, paying employees is a priority. The second priority I’ve heard people talking about is finding out who owes them money, because cash flow is going to become a real problem for the next few months for a lot of companies.”

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