The Knife and the Hacksaw

At 12:51 on 22 February 2011, Brian Coker was on the first-floor landing of the Pyne Gould building on Cambridge Terrace, about to step out for lunch, when the ground let go. A cascading concrete wall swept him off his feet and pinned him between a pillar and a collapsed section of floor. In the dark, in the dust, in pain he called excruciating, he did a strange thing: he texted his wife Helen, not for rescue but to tell her he loved her and might not make it. He later said he wanted a decent aftershock to finish it. Around him he could hear other people in the building screaming. Eighteen people in that building died that day.

Dr Lydia Johns Putra was a urologist in Christchurch for a medical conference. She saw the collapsed building, told the emergency crews she was a surgeon, and crawled up the ruined stairwell that was shuddering with aftershocks. There was no other way to get Coker out. He was bleeding to death, pinned where no machinery could reach him. So she amputated both his legs above the knee with a pocket knife and a borrowed hacksaw. An anaesthetist was part of the team. Tourniquets, a knife and a saw, "that's what you would use in an operating theatre, but that's what we had." At one point she was too tired to keep sawing, and the hacksaw was passed to the other doctor, then a firefighter, then a police officer, all of them taking turns.

They got him out at seven that night. Coker survived.

Today the building is gone. The Crown bought the site in 2013, and where the Pyne Gould building stood there is now a lawn, a few benches, and a sign asking people to respect the ground.

Coker doesn't linger here. He and Helen, married nearly forty years, volunteer as peer support for the New Zealand Artificial Limb Service, sitting with people facing the same operation he did. "Before amputation people tend to think about all the stuff they can't do," he says. "I try and focus on the things you can do." He has ridden the New York and Christchurch marathons on a hand bike.

The knife they cut him free with was a Leatherman. Two years after the quake, running that New York marathon, Coker looked up its inventor, Tim Leatherman. They are old friends now, and when Leatherman visited Christchurch, the two of them came back here and stood on this grass where the building used to be.