My Account
It’s almost a year since the devastating Auckland Anniversary Day floods. But if another civil defence emergency happened today, would the Hibiscus Coast be better prepared?
A report commissioned into Auckland Council’s response to the flooding focused on the need for proper maintenance of drains, culverts and soak pits (see story) as well as for civil defence support to be balanced between centralisation of planning and localisation of service delivery.
Hibiscus and Bays Local Board chair, Gary Brown, says while work is ongoing to improve the area’s emergency preparedness, he is confident we are a lot further down the track than last January.
Several initiatives are in the pipeline. These include the local board and Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) funding four groups across the Hibiscus and Bays area, to develop community resilience networks. Brown says these will “swing into action during emergencies and will be ready if they are called upon when AEM asks.”
“The local board recognised that our area was caught out terribly after the events of Auckland Anniversary weekend. So we now have these groups that are made up of locals from the surf clubs, business associations, community organisations, churches, and schools,” Brown says. “They are also connected with local emergency services when they have the first response station (at Hilltop) set up in an emergency.
It has taken a while to get this organised and it is an ongoing process, but it’s about empowering the community to do what it does best – use local knowledge to care for our neighbours, while acting as a communications line to the centralised response.”
Brown says he expects that the local board will play a role in the overall governance of these new groups and, once they are operational, they will connect the community plans with the AEM local board response plans.
“There are a lot of complexities with so many groups, but we are focusing on supporting our communities to be more prepared as best we can.”
He says there has still been no confirmation of locations for local emergency shelters, although the Stanmore Bay Leisure Centre will again be activated as a hub, depending on the emergency.
AEM acting general manager, Adam Maggs, says multiple actions to improve AEM capacity and effectiveness for emergency responses have been completed.
These include reviewing the Civil Defence and Emergency Management Group Plan and organisational structure; implementing wide-ranging enhanced training for staff; reviewing and confirming the model, process, roles and standard operating procedures for emergency response communications; creating the new role of lifeline utilities adviser as well as a dedicated communications role and refreshing the AEM website to improve it as an emergency response communications channel.
Maggs says other work underway includes contingency planning for tsunami and volcanic hazards; reviewing standard operating procedures of the emergency response welfare function; expanding work to support marae and resilience strategies and contingency planning for flood alerting.
“We are also developing local board readiness and response plans to help clarify preparedness arrangements for local boards and their communities before, during and after emergency events. This includes working with local boards to identify locations for Civil Defence centres (managed by AEM) and community emergency hubs (managed by the community).”
He says AEM has also carried out a number of other actions to improve operational readiness for an emergency response, including ongoing duty training for staff; relationship building with local boards and liaising with Healthy Waters on the work it is doing around flooding, including the Auckland Flood Viewer and Get Prepared resources.
