Ensuring resilience
One of the key threads of our vision ‘To be the most prosperous and liveable district in the North Island by 2022’ is resilience.
In our daily work that means our plans, infrastructure, and work programmes are designed to ensure we are prepared to withstand or recover quickly from disasters and/or difficult situations. It also means we will be flexible and respond quickly to change.
One of the most important roles we play in the community is managing emergencies through Civil Defence. Given the natural hazardscape in our district, the likelihood of our district being affected by earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and other natural events is very high and our current emergency operations centre is small and not fit for purpose.
We want to include a fit-for-purpose emergency operations centre in our building plans. This is required to be of a certain standard by law, referred to as IL4 (importance level), as it will be considered a post-disaster facility. We believe that it makes sense to design the entire building to IL4 standard. This will mean we can continue to function to manage the response, help with recovery, and carry out our business as usual activities. It will allow us to respond to our utmost potential at a time when our communities need us the most.
