At 12:51 on 22 February 2011, a 64-year-old government worker named John Haynes was on the sixth floor of the Forsyth Barr tower, seventeen storeys above this corner of Colombo and Armagh Streets. The earthquake lasted about ten seconds. When it was over, he said, "the guts of the building fell down 17 storeys. We just had a shell of a building." Where the internal stairwell had been, there was a gaping hole.
Haynes was a mountaineer. Not a professional but a climbing enthusiast, the sort of man who spent weekends on ropes in the Southern Alps. That hobby was about to become the only exit plan in the building.
Around him in the dark, with the structure creaking and aftershocks hammering, were his colleagues. They had emergency equipment installed after the September 11 attacks in 2001: coils of rope, and a sledgehammer. Haynes racked his brains. He remembered how, on a mountain, you get down when the way back is gone, you abseil. He persuaded his terrified colleagues that the only way out was to lower themselves twenty metres down the face of the building, to the roof of the ground-floor car park below.
They took the sledgehammer to a window. Haynes described what came through as "a great flood of light." Then he rigged two ropes and began lowering people down the sheer face of the tower, one by one, for two perilous hours, while the aftershocks kept coming. He wrapped the ropes around his own body so they would not slip through his fingers, and sat on the office floor so that the weight of the person on the rope could not pull him out of the shattered window. "It's like you were in a war zone with the shells coming over as you're still trying to do your job," he said.
One by one he sent fourteen of his colleagues over the edge and down to the car park roof. When the last of them was down, he prepared to make his own descent. But rescuers on the street had seen what was happening, and a crane swung up to lift the man who had just lowered the others to safety.
Afterwards, Haynes refused to be called a hero. He said he simply felt "a real sense of satisfaction that I was able to look after those people and get them safely away." And then he said the thing that explains the two hours on the window ledge: "Their lives were in my hands, and that's a hell of a responsibility."
The building did not fall. It stood with the stairwells gone, the shell intact, and after years of strengthening it was reborn as a hotel. The corner looks different now; you can walk it in minutes, buy a coffee, look up at seventeen storeys. Somewhere around the sixth floor, a man with ropes and a sledgehammer and forty years of weekends in the mountains answered a question nobody in that building had ever expected to be asked.
Source
ABC News (Australia)