Telecommunications resilience efforts are being re-examined after Cyclone Gabrielle left many communities either without essential communications or with tenuous remaining links. Photo: 123rf
Analysis - Hawke's Bay dodged a much worse cellphone and internet blackout in Cyclone Gabrielle when fuel supplies ran critically low, papers show.
Papers released to RNZ show an urgent plea went out for emergency responders to get diesel to a Napier hub that was keeping all three communications networks in the area going.
The narrow escape shows up how some critical infrastructure was becoming more, not less, vulnerable, because it was more centralised.
At the same time, the Official Information Act (OIA) papers showed the government had been spinning its wheels, and even now lacked the legal power to get more done to disaster-proof communications.
Reporter Phil Pennington speaks to Morning Report
Email records showed that in Napier, on 15 February, a plea went up from a network operator: "Much more urgently, I'm told we have only 48 hours of fuel left.
"We urgently need the fuel plan from NEMA to ensure we are given priority access to refuel this generator as it is the sole operational node for all three networks in the area."
In the end they got the fuel, but hours into the unprecedented disaster they had lacked the necessary National Emergency Management Agency directive merely to put them first in line.
The growing vulnerability of high-tech fibre-optic and other systems increasingly reliant on central "nodes", was a warning raised repeatedly in advice to ministers for several years, the OIA briefings showed.
Centralisation "provides more choice and flexibility for consumers but can result in new risks and greater impacts when outages do occur", a report last June said.
Read the documents here: The Official Information Act reply on telecommunications advice provided to ministers, as supplied to RNZ (9.7MB)
Power cuts that took down whole "fibre, copper and mobile networks" all at once during Cyclone Gabrielle were another worsening chokepoint of interdependency, the report showed.
"Today, most regional voice, mobile and broadband services will not work when key nodes are affected by natural hazards."
It does not appear to take much to grasp this.
Learn more about comms blackouts in an emergency from this March episode of The Detail
But as the ministerial briefings and official assessments of the risks had piled up, stretching back to 2016, so had the crises and the toll taken, whether from repeated Northland floods or from West Coast lightning taking out all fibre-optic connections for two days in 2021.
The fibre-optic link between Westport and Karamea after heavy rain. Photo: Supplied/ TCF
In 2018, engineers at Opus advised the government to assess vulnerable bridges.
But in 2019, and again in 2021, bridge-busting floods in Canterbury took out fibre-optic connections - and even some 111 emergency calling - to swathes of the lower South Island.
Not enough had been done in the interim, despite the alert going up.
RNZ was now asking the Digital Economy and Communications Minister Ginny Andersen if the bridge survey was ever done.
Digital Economy and Communications Minister Ginny Andersen. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Her ministry, MBIE, got a big study done of telcos' resilience in 2018, sparked by the damaging Kaikōura quake.
"Despite this engagement ... [and] due to continued natural disasters exposing vulnerabilities, officials consider we do not have enough information to make an informed judgement on network operators' resilience decisions," officials told the minister three years later.
This 'flying blind' advice occurred again and again, such as in a briefing earlier in 2023, about a survey the Telecommunications Forum sent the minister.
It "does not provide enough detail to determine what the greatest risks are to network resilience, nor whether government intervention may be necessary to lift sector resilience" and "identify priority initiatives", officials said.
Despite this, MBIE told RNZ the forum survey was one of the two most substantive reports it received on telecommunications resilience in the run-up to Cyclone Gabrielle. The other was a report from Chorus that officials similarly said lacked details.
The call for a bridge survey showed up another theme: Network operators' reluctance to do what the government thought they should in the run-up to disaster.
"Network operators took the view that transport infrastructure vulnerabilities are the responsibility of government, and not private telecommunications providers who use transport routes for their network," a 2021 briefing said.
The run-up contrasted with often speedy and effective restoration of services afterwards, officials noted.
For instance, in Hawke's Bay, on the Wednesday in the week Cyclone Gabrielle hit, there were more than 620 cell sites down, but by the Sunday, the count was less than 50, the OIA emails showed.
However, at the same time, planning could be better, the briefings said: A lack of generators to power cell towers back up was a featured failing during Gabrielle.
Other reports showed how the companies were also not keen in 2019 on an $11m plan to bring in backup generators to provide two weeks of power in the capital (mostly for quake risks).
Read the document: Lifelines Regional Resilience Project, October 2019 (41MB)
Since then, each of the half dozen major operators had argued in letters to the minister, in late 2021, that they had been doing their part to build resilience - though officials stated categorically, there was not enough detail to really know what the risks were, or what to prioritise to mitigate them.
In mid-2021, amid Canterbury's flooding, officials said: "There is no dedicated telecommunications resilience project currently on the communications policy work programme".
Even the wielding of the "national security" stick had not worked to free up one of the few levers the government had: Law reforms to set a minimum resilience level for critical infrastructure, and to increase visibility of where the networks were really at.
Various briefings talked up the way the law change would change the game.
The new legislation was first promised in 2019, then again in 2021.
By June 2022, Minister of National Security and Intelligence Jacinda Ardern had stepped in: She wanted to finalise the emergency management reforms "quickly". It has not happened.
Cabinet has approved several legislative changes, but not yet committed to going ahead, and there needed to be "a lot more policy work", it was said last year.
Read the documents: Cabinet Decisions, Emergency Management System Reform - Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (1.5MB)
Last week, the government told RNZ it was pushing the reform bill back to the next sitting block, so it could learn "any lessons" from Cyclone Gabrielle.
And what about who would pay for all this disaster-proofing?
Gabrielle had changed the trade-off between investment in tech upgrades versus spending on resilience, adding some weight to the latter's side - but the papers state repeatedly that a commercial imperative was lacking.
That pushed the pendulum toward one of the only other levers the government has: Direct grants.
"Another mechanism is for government to offer funding (ie grants) to network operators for resilience projects," the June 2021 ministerial briefing said.
"This would ensure the decisions around which network vulnerabilities should be prioritised are in the hands of the network operators, who know their networks best. It would also remove the commercial barrier to making resilience decisions in the public interest."
Spark was majoring on "co-investment" with government, and casting about for overseas models of this.
Flip sides, and Andersen told RNZ last week: "It is first and foremost the responsibility of the companies who own and operate the networks to ensure they are resilient."
Budget 2023 included $6b for national resilience projects, however the plans to spend it were "in very early stages" and "have not been developed", Andersen said.
That sits awkwardly with the ministerial briefings since 2021 that said significant government programmes of work were underway.
As for resilience reforms to critical national infrastructure, these "are still only at a scoping stage", a February 2023 briefing said.
No rush then.
And what about the consumer, and the impact on your pocket?
MBIE officials were wondering about that, too, telling the government a year ago: "We would be interested to understand how expensive resilient services currently on offer are for those who pay for them, and how a more resilient service offering to all consumers would impact pricing."