Police at a flooded property on Whareora Road in Whangārei during Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo: RNZ/ Soumya Bhamidipati
- A police debrief on Cyclone Gabrielle uses the word "overwhelmed" five times in eight pages
- It praises individual heroics, while finding plenty of systematic gaps
- It recommends police make disaster response a core business - but warns of the price tag
Cyclone Gabrielle quickly overwhelmed police and they are not properly prepared for the next such disaster, a newly released report shows.
The report shows Gabrielle cost police about $60 million, and while it warns that getting beyond a "just in time" response will create more costs, it still recommends doing it.
Unlike the other scathing storm reviews by other agencies that have been publicly released so far this year, the police one was written more than a year ago but has only just been released under the Official Information Act.
The eight-page debrief used the word "overwhelmed" five times, including of the police's emergency co-ordination centre and emergency call system.
It praised officers for "doing heroic things" and showing community leadership, and said they quickly managed to track down a substantial number of people who had been reported missing.
It found some systems worked well, but identified many gaps.
This included basics like too few four-wheeled drives, confusion over who was in charge, and the 111 and 105 systems unable to easily prioritise or share calls.
"Despite early planning and preparation, our ECC [emergency co-ordination centre] was not prepared for the scale of impacts and was quickly overwhelmed by sheer volume.
"There was little surge capacity available."
It said there was confusion between police passing jobs from the centre to the districts - with some jobs falling through the cracks.
"Some events were cancelled without explanation or resolution ,creating confusion and risk."
The report contained a host of recommendations - the number one was to make disaster response a core function for the first time - but warned that time was tight and funds were short.
"Police are not geared toward response... as core business," it said.
"Severe weather events have already become so frequent that police should consider including specific planning, adaptation, and disaster response to flooding, coastal storm surge, other severe weather events."
This had "significant fiscal implications".
Most of the almost $60m cost came from writing off gear worth $10m and replacing it for $45m.
The findings echoed those of the other storm response reviews released earlier this year, such as Fire and Emergency and NEMA's reports that detailed a litany of failures, some successes and with the scale of the storm repeatedly offered in mitigation for not being ready.
But the police debrief could join the country's long list of reviews that find gaps, make recommendations and are then forgotten until the next disaster.
"Police currently respond on an 'just in time' basis," the June 2023 debrief said.
"This approach is likely to be inadequate as the frequency and severity of weather events increases in coming years."
Too little, too late
The police's major operations centre - which backed up their frontline staff in the Hawke's Bay and other districts - did a lot of work, but with too few people.
The centre's staffing was "ad hoc" and there was no register of who was trained and available.
Districts also lacked people, staff welfare suffered and "near misses" went unreported. Officers leapt in without properly assessing the threat.
"We do not believe that the reports made during this operation are actually reflective of the incidents/near misses experienced" and this should be fixed, it said.
A bright spot was that as people's panicked calls flooded in, a new national operating model for the 105 line kicked in, with "pre-recorded messages ready to go when... overwhelmed".
But staff handling the calls from there confronted a "huge spike [and] manual processes", and 105 "cannot surge easily to support 111 anymore". RNZ is asking for more information about this issue.
Many officers' close relationships with marae and others in the community was also highlighted as a bright spot.
"Initial days there were reports of RSE [regional seasonal] workers being washed away. By week 2 all were accounted for due to relationships already in place."
In the field, officers struggled to talk to each other as "radio/cell phone capability was significantly restricted".
Out of the field, they also struggled to get things done. "It was difficult to transfer events out of the ECC and into the emergency response on the ground."
This caused "confusion... distress and delays". There were "inefficiencies, additional uncertainty, and frustration" amid the storm, even though in the build-up communications were "on the whole well-coordinated".
Police also struggled to talk to other agencies, such as local civil defence groups so "overwhelmed" that their jobs often fell to police to do.
While it is a space age for communication technology, the disaster response struggled with comms systems.
"Different communications platforms remain a barrier - currently rely largely on phone and email. Not efficient," the debrief said.
"AoG [all-of-government] remained siloed and this had an impact."
RNZ has reported extensively on agencies lacking a common operating platform or picture (a COP) to allow hundreds or thousands of users to collaborate online, almost in real time, as other countries do.
The debrief also goes there, recommending that police "continue to raise lack of common operating and communications platform with NEMA and DPMC [Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet] as part of Catastrophic Readiness Planning work programme".
Various police technology upgrades have been paused, reduced or dumped due to budget constraints, including upgrade of the technology behind the 111 system.
The government said in April it would consider all the various reviews over coming months as it also worked on new emergency management legislation, and also pointed to more co-ordinated responses to more recent emergencies - although these were much smaller ones, such as the Christchurch Port Hills fire.