A Walking Tour through the shattered

It’s finally here. CERA have set up a walkway into Cathedral Square, and will be allowing 300 people per hour over 22 hours of the weekend to walk down Colombo St, and into Cathedral Square. There’s a video you can view here, with Warwick Isaacs (General Manager Operations for CERA) walking the route, talking about what will stay and what will go, as well as what has already gone. Have a look, but with a box of tissues handy and nothing that needs you to have emotional control for an hour or so.

Again, I am incredibly impressed with how sensitive and sensible CERA are being in this. If you look at the official Information and Conditions bit, you’ll see things like ‘stay within the fences’ (of course), ‘no pets (guide dogs permitted)’ (again, sensible), and ‘wear sturdy shoes.’

But also a piece of instruction more usually issued by DOC for people tramping in the mountains – ‘carry a charged cellphone or tell someone where you are going’.
O-kay …

And then the one that hit me – ‘carry personal ID on your body, not in a bag’.

It’s probably a bit naive of me to feel touched and even comforted by that particular instruction. But it says a lot about the way CERA are starting to let us in to the process of our city’s rebuilding. It’s not softened, but it’s not thrown out as some sort of harsh commandment either. It’s adult to adult, and after all that we’ve been through since last September, that is something that gives me hope.