Remembering the 53 nurses killed in the Christchurch earthquake

“I just like to keep things going, and my motto is ‘remember the nurses’,” said Randle, who works at the Christchurch Hospital children’s surgery ward.

Randle — who will be 70 in November — has been a nurse for 52 years and NZNO delegate for 42. She says people are often “gobsmacked” when they find out how many nurses actually died that day, in the magnitude 6.3 earthquake that struck on February 22, 2011.

“Some of them were tourists, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of them worked at Christchurch Hospital as a duty nurse manager.”

Of the 185 people who lost their lives that day, 53 were nurses. Many were from overseas, studying English in the CTV building that collapsed in preparation for their registration exam. Others were working in a medical clinic there, or were off duty and in the central city — or simply visitors, unfortunate tourists.

And for nearly a decade, every year on May 12, International Nurses’ Day, Randle has been there, paying her respects — even last year, just three weeks after hip surgery.

It was a few years later, at the opening of the city’s memorial wall in 2017, when another RN, Terry McLaughlin, realised he knew many of the victims’ names as they were read out.

Working in customer services at Christchurch Hospital on the day of the earthquake, McLaughlin had received several overseas calls from families seeking news of their loved ones in New Zealand.

I could hear the children in the rooms around me saying: ‘help, help’.

He did some sleuthing, and discovered that altogether 53 nurses from eight countries — 16 from China, 13 from Japan, 11 from the Phillippines, six from Thailand, four from New Zealand and one each from Canada, Ireland and Taiwan — had died in the quake.

McLaughlin alerted NZNO via what was then its Canterbury regional council (now, local organising group). Randle, a member, suggested laying a wreath every year on May 12.

“So we made a commitment, NZNO regional council, that we would commemorate them on International Nurses’ Day every year, so that’s what we’ve done.”

Each year, the wreath is laid under the name of a different nurse.

At first, the community and media thronged the wreath-laying ceremony for the lost nurses. But nine years later, numbers have “whittled down” to a handful — and that’s something she wants to remedy.

“It’s not something that’s well known — even Christchurch people don’t know,” Randle told Kaitiaki. “So, again, we want to make sure that people remember.”

Randle also makes and lays a wreath every ANZAC day in the nurses’ memorial chapel at dawn, for nurses who lost their lives in WWI.

The Canterbury NZNO members have also erected a park bench in memory of the 51 victims of the 2019 mosque shootings.