Preparing for disaster: How Canterbury responds in an emergency

Meetings in cupboards in over-crowded Emergency Operations Centres, equipment failures and inexperienced staff - report after report into our emergency responses have found widespread failures.

But those working in Canterbury's emergency management believe the region is prepared for and is capable of responding well to major events - at the level of Cyclone Gabrielle or larger.

Waitaha Canterbury has been through its fair share of disasters - the 2011 earthquakes, 2016 Kaikōura earthquake and 2021 Ashburton floods.

A lot has been learnt each time, said the region's Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) group controller James Thompson.

The Kaikōura quake exposed uneven levels of trained emergency staff across Canterbury's ten councils.

Since, work had been done to develop surge capacity - the ability to get staff and resources quickly when an emergency happens, he said.

"Now we've got a pool of around about 55 staff who have undergone extra training to support each other across the region and in fact, a lot of their support goes to other parts of the country. Those people supported the North Island during Cyclone Gabrielle," Thompson said.

Processes also changed to improve welfare and rural property assessments following the Ashburton floods, which included being able to complete paperwork both digitally or manually, he said.

"We found it hard to create that big picture for ourselves. Now we can create that picture a lot quicker and we can escalate up the issues to a national level with more speed, reducing delays of getting help to people."

Jamie Ruwhiu managed Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu's whānau and emergency response programme.

In the past five years there had been a concerted effort to prepare communities, create iwi liaison roles and increase collaboration across agencies, he said.

"We had the Port Hills fires this year. We'd already experienced that a few years beforehand, having the advantage of that just made our response a lot sharper, the communication channels were way better because people knew who each other were, between iwi, between rūnanga, between the regional Civil Defence [teams]. Those relationships are just really key," Ruwhiu said.

By September, in partnership with Te Puni Kōkiri - the Ministry of Māori Development, Ngāi Tahu will have 24 emergency pods dispersed across the region, he said.

"These emergency pods are like big, 20 foot shipping containers with emergency resources - dehydrated food, water bladders, small generators, hygiene packs, clothing - basic emergency resources that each of our communities will need in events similar to Cyclone Gabrielle and in event of an Alpine Fault rupture."

The pods were designed to withstand a big earthquake on the Alpine fault - to at least magnitude eight in size.

Marae were open to everyone in need, and Ngāi Tahu would extend its support further afield if required, Ruwhiu said.

"Feel free to go in and make contact with a marae, they are prepared, their communications are top notch, they have Starlink units, if the power goes out, they have generators, there's always food in the freezers and on the pantry shelves."

Ngāi Tahu provided support to iwi and whānau affected by Cyclone Gabrielle, and had also received support following the Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes.

Ashburton Mayor Neil Brown heads the Civil Defence Emergency Committee for the Canterbury Mayoral Forum.

He wanted to see central government pick up the bill for emergency response training so that it was consistently funded.

"Certainly funding coming from the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) would be great, and they do deliver funding when emergencies happen, but in preparedness - we're just going through a Long Term Plan [process] now - Canterbury Regional Council control our dollars," Brown said.

"There's been a submission there to put more dollars into our group CDEM activity to get another person on board there to do more training and keep everyone up to where they should be."

Currently, the focus was on making sure people were aware of what a major disaster will look like and knew that help wouldn't immediately be there - especially in isolated areas, he said.

"We have three days possibly on your own and there's also talk of moving that out to seven days. Seven days of no assistance from anyone else. You need to be prepared for that and that's all around education."

Mother Nature was unpredictable, and community civil defence teams would be happy to answer any questions about their local plans or recommended resident preparations, Thompson said.