It’s been over six years since that first Christchurch earthquake hit and the Government has now approved the Recovery Plan for the Waimakariri Residential Red Zone; that’s the area that includes Kaiapoi, and the small coastal beach settlements of Pines and Kairaki.

The plan dropped in my Inbox yesterday afternoon and I pulled up the map and had a look at how the Government plans to use some of that land.

So many were touched in so many ways by the earthquakes. Those who live there have been affected the most of course, but many who were born there, or have family there, or other connections, well, what happened in Christchurch has changed so many lives forever.

And I had one of those moments yesterday afternoon while sitting at my desk at home, and looking over that map. The tiny settlement of Kairaki Beach at the mouth of the Waimakariri was red-zoned some time ago, and I remember when that decision was made. My family had a bach in that tiny community some years ago and we spent many a happy summer down by the mouth of the Waimakariri as part of that small, fishing community. My grandfather, tragically, died at Kairaki when he was just 55. I was very young but I still remember it. I was too young to say Grandad so I called him Gaga and to this day, I still call him by that name. My memories of him are the memories of a very young child, frozen in time by a tragedy.

That bach was Gaga's pride and joy. He was a hard-working, tight-fisted Scot – Donald Mackie was his name – and he was an incredibly talented cabinet-maker. In my son's room there is a chest of drawers that my grandfather made for his eldest daughter, my mother. The French Polish must be more than 50 years old now, but it looks as good as new. He was a hard-working man with a perfectionist eye and he worked every hour of the day.

He had a freehold house in Barrington, the best vege garden you've ever seen - the tomatoes, the beans, the potatoes - they were the talk of the neighbourhood, and then he saved all of his pennies to buy that bach in Kairaki. He liked to fish. I have a photo of him holding an enormous salmon out the front of that bach. It was a classic kiwi bach. Solid, three bedrooms, the perfect front lawn for playing cricket, a good 1970s patterned carpet, and a functional formica bathroom and kitchen.

But one fateful day, my grandfather noticed a branch on one of the big pine trees out the back of the house was threatening to come down in the backyard. And so he climbed the tree to cut it down, but the branch he was standing on snapped. He flung him violently into the air and when he came down, his head struck an old tree stump in the grass. My grandfather never made it to hospital. He died in the ambulance on the way.

The family held on to the bach for some years, but eventually we let it go. My brother and I often regret that we did. But in the February 2010 earthquake, the Kairaki settlement was, as they say in Christchurch, munted in the quake. This little known community was badly hit. Later, it would be red-zoned and soon after that decision was made I drove to Kairaki, with my heart in my mouth, to look at the bach. It was abandoned and in a pretty sorry state. I could still see my Grandfather in that photo, standing in front of his neat-as-a-pin bach in his waders and holding that enormous salmon, but only just.

And then, the following year, I went back and the bach was gone. There was nothing. The area where the house had stood and where my grandfather had died had been flattened. The sand dunes had claimed back some of the land and there was nothing to suggest a home had once stood there. It was gone. Everything. Gone in the blink of an eye.

And as I looked at the plan that arrived in my Inbox yesterday, I could see the area of land were the bach once stood has now been given to the Tuhaitara Trust. It will remain bare land. No permanent structure can ever be built on it. I guess it will probably become a picnic area or an ecological site and no-one will ever know the great joy and the great tragedy that little square of land once brought to our family.

But my story is just one story - there are thousands and thousands of New Zealanders who have seen history rewritten in the space of an earthquake. And there will be many who, like me, have sat quietly at their desk pondering the impact of an email, and remembering back to a time when the earth didn't shake and nothing was more permanent than bricks and mortar.