Kendyll Mitchell no longer sweats the small stuff.
Since being trapped in the wreckage of the Canterbury Television building with her two small children after the earthquake struck, trivial things don’t worry her anymore.
However, she does find it difficult to be in tall buildings or walk through arcades where the walls could fall in on her. “There are a few things I struggle with, but I have to force myself to do them. I can’t avoid something like tall buildings for the rest of my life.”
She also often fears for the safety of her kids, who could easily have been killed when the building collapsed. In total, 115 people died in the CTV building, but Jett (now 4) and Dita (21 months) escaped unscathed.
Instead, it was hairdresser Kendyll (28) who suffered serious injuries. These included a severe gash to her leg, a head injury after she was knocked unconscious and her pelvis was broken in three places.
“When I came around after being knocked out I saw [the children] were covered in blood, but they didn’t seem to be hurt. It was my blood.”
Kendyll and her children were on the fifth floor in the waiting room at Relationship Services when the quake struck. Jett was seeing a counsellor there as he wasn’t coping well after the September quake and Kendyll had arrived 15 minutes early. “When the shaking started, I thought it was another aftershock and I grabbed Jett because of his paranoia.
I held on to Dita’s stroller and it just went on and on. Everything was moving so much I couldn’t even get up out of the chair and when the internal wall started to disintegrate, I knew it was bad.
“My last thought before everything collapsed and we started falling was that we were going to die.” Kendyll was knocked unconscious as she and the children fell down to the second floor.
When she regained consciousness they were in “a kind of cubbyhole” surrounded by rubble. She could see patches of light and then spotted something terrifying – smoke. “I thought, ‘Why have we survived this fall if we’re going to get taken out by fire?’“
Fortunately, Kendyll’s cries for help were heard by workmen, who pulled them out. One of them, Evan McLellan, rescued numerous people from the ruins and Kendyll doesn’t think she’d be here today if it wasn’t for him. “Within four to five minutes, the smoke would have engulfed us,” she says.
Another man who helped to carry her from the building turned out to be a friend of her partner, Hayden Lamont, and he called Hayden (30) to let him know his family was alive. Kendyll was taken to hospital where the gash in her leg was stitched up by torchlight because of power outages.
She was sent home, but she and Hayden decided to immediately leave the stricken city for Timaru, where they both have family. It wasn’t until the next day, when Kendyll went to Timaru Hospital for further x-rays, that she learned her pelvis was broken in three places. “The doctors said I was very lucky that it didn’t collapse on itself and crush my organs.”
A year on, Kendyll is still having physiotherapy and the family is still in Timaru. “We’ve chosen not to go back to Christchurch for a while because of the fear there’s going to be another quake. I can’t cope with the constant worrying.”
Physically, she is recovering slowly and it will be at least another year before she’s expected to be back to normal. Jett is still on edge but doing a lot better and little Dita will never remember the quake because she was only 10 months old at the time.
“When I think about the people who lost their lives in that building… all I can say is that I am so grateful we all survived. We had a very, very lucky escape.”
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