After the earthquake that ravaged Christchurch in 2011, a new city will soon rise from the rubbles. In its website, BBC reporter Phil Mercer writes about the city's brick by brick construction with the help of migrant workers from Britain, Ireland, Fiji and Spain. However, Buildtech, the commercial and residential construction firm based in Christchurch has apparently hired more Filipino workers than all other nationalities combined together. Almost half of Buildtech's strong workforces in Christchurch are migrants who are now enjoying great benefits from the firm.
Israel Cooper, the director of Buildtech, believes that Christchurch's reconstruction becomes utterly fast with the help of migrant workers. He thinks that the city's rebuilding could have been lagging 2 to 3 years behind where it is now.
In an interview with BBC, Cooper underscored the importance of hiring foreign workers to hasten the city's reconstruction from scratch. "We would not be able to deliver on the projects we have if we could not attract and retain foreign staff. It is very difficult to find and attract suitably skilled local staff. We are training a large number of apprentices, but this is a longer-term solution and does not meet the immediate need," Cooper explained.
In an article by the Sydney Morning Herald, Garry Moore, the former mayor of Christchurch, stated that the city has now the opportunity to erect an "''environmentally sound, fantastically state-of-the-art, 21st century place that will attract the brains and the thinkers of the world." He sees Christchurch's reconstruction itself as a paradox. "We lost a lot of our beauty and that has to be rebuilt, in a modern way,'' Moore further asserted.
The earthquake-ruined city where a number of buildings had been laid waste is an indelible picture of what happened in the past, and a reminder that reconstructing the city will still definitely take quite a ways ahead.
