Taupō emergency manager rolls up sleeves in Nelson

During a natural disaster, the response often demands more from local civil defence emergency management than it can provide.

In these situations, civil defence staff from throughout New Zealand may be deployed to help out.

That was the case in Nelson recently as it was hit by record rainfall which caused severe flooding, landslides and road closures.

Taupō District Council’s own emergency manager Hadley Tattle spent five days in Nelson as a planning manager in the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC).

While going to help out, if available, is a no-brainer for Mr Tattle, he says it also benefits the Taupō emergency management team as a learning experience.

“You go wherever the need is and obviously that need was in the Nelson area,” he says.

“One of the cool things about emergency management is everyone’s keen to help and there’s a big community of emergency management people in New Zealand.

“At the same time, you can do a million practice exercises, but nothing really prepares you like the real thing. There are always things that pop up, outside of the box, that you have to think about. That experience is invaluable and it also gives you an opportunity to see how another region does things, their systems and processes, and reflect on how we do things here.”

The flooding, and damage caused by the flooding, was significant.

“It was a pretty big EOC, I think we had between 50 and 70 staff and it initially ran 24 hours a day, with staff doing 12 hour shifts.

“The challenge was that the rain just kept coming. It wasn’t a one-off rainfall event, there were multiple days with multiple impacts. It went from being a flooding event to a land instability event. Once the soil was saturated, there were a whole lot of properties that were at risk from landslides or had landslides occur to them.

“There were ongoing evacuations, ongoing welfare needs...in short, it was very busy.

“Within the EOC, there were a number of local Nelson/Tasman staff and some were impacted by the flooding personally. It was pretty incredible that they had properties that were affected but they were still in the EOC working. That definitely puts things in perspective.”

Mr Tattle says deployment to other areas of New Zealand is made easier for those involved by the use of a common system.

“Being a coordinated incident management system, it doesn’t matter where you go to, you know it will all be structured the same, there are no surprises.”

One challenge, however, was getting used to an unfamiliar geographical area. Mr Tattle says having “really good data” and good visibility of that data is important and something he will work on for Taupō.

“Having good spatial awareness of the region you’re in is really helpful, particularly for those coming in from outside the region.

“You need to have everyone on the same page, really quickly, about where things are happening, what the potential risks are and looking ahead to what might come.

“For a controller making decisions around evacuations or returning people to their homes, they need to have confidence in both of those decisions.”