The Herald has spoken to key players inside the office of Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown during the monumental communication and emergency response breakdown to the January 27, 2023, floods that left four people dead. Tom Dillane reports
There was a disconnect from the start.
Mayor Wayne Brown entered Auckland Council headquarters as most others were leaving.
Many staff in the $260 million publicly owned Albert Street high-rise had not even come in that day.
There were floors of lifeless grey offices perched above hectic streets that had been rained on for many hours. Rather than subsiding, it seemed to be getting heavier.
There was an earlier than usual peak-hour logjam too - a Friday that led into the January 27 Auckland Anniversary weekend.
Forty thousand people had optimistically begun a cross-city migration to see Elton John’s replacement concert at Mt Smart Stadium in the southeastern suburb of Penrose.
Auckland Transport, in its wisdom, had closed the local train station for the night, scheduling replacement bus services and “recommending” concertgoers drive instead.
Centrally, the midtown construction chaos of the City Rail Link impeded every road access to council HQ. An arterial clot of concrete, loose gravel and temporary fencing surrounded it.
“A lot of people had left already, I think, and at any given time, the council building is not very full,” the mayor’s then newly hired chief of staff Max Hardy said.
“A lot of people work from home on Fridays and a lot of people would have been on leave because of the long weekend.”
Brown swiped his key card to enter the basement carpark of the council’s Albert Street headquarters at 4.08pm on January 27.
Auckland’s 76-year-old new mayor had not originally planned to enter the building to monitor the rain situation that would keep him there for the next nine hours.
It was just a social call - Brown arrived with his adult son to show him the facilities for the first time since he had been elected on October 8, 2022.
They were going to have a drink from the dedicated beer fridge in his office and admire the stunning birds-eye panorama of the Hauraki Gulf and downtown Auckland.
Brown’s recollection of those initial hours makes it clear there was little alarm within the select group in his office.
“If you’re not told what’s going on, you’re not aware of the size of the situation. I mean it rained and [we] looked out the window.
“Everything went well in the city. There’s people wandering around in bars. No flooding. I don’t have a TV in the office. I didn’t know what was on TV.
“I mean, if no one told you, would you know there was a war in Ukraine?”
But it had been a trying morning in other ways.
Brown’s wife, Toni, had been unwell. He had been keeping an eye on her while working in some capacity from his Karangahape Road unit just 1.5km away.
Yet it’s still not entirely clear in what capacity that was. His Friday diary to that point had no scheduled meetings.
So at 4.13pm Brown and his son reached his level 27 office to greet Hardy - who had only been in the role since December 5 after leaving his position as a partner at New Zealand’s top litigation firm, Meredith Connell.
Three months into the job, the office was bare. The shelves on a wall of mounted wooden bookcases were empty except for a couple of stacked hats. They formed a backing to a modest white office desk with a computer.
A large wooden table filled up much of the other side of the room.
A source from the mayor’s office said there was no personal interaction that night between the mayor and Auckland Council chief executive Jim Stabback, who left his level 15 office at about 4.45pm to return to his Parnell home.
Stabback had texted Brown at 4.06pm from within the building to say Auckland Emergency Management was supporting Fire and Emergency and response agencies regarding “some flooding in Swans and Ranui”.
He added that the “weather is expected to abate”.
It did not.
And there was little time for Brown and his group to savour their first beer.
The new mayor, who had previously announced “it’s nobody’s business” what specific hours he kept and that weekends were not necessarily on the table, would work for the next 25 straight days.
‘You missed the best story’
Brown should have been better prepared to dismiss his chief executive’s false assurance.
Weather warnings had been issued to Auckland Council’s 20 governing body elected members, and 149 local board members, in the prior 48 hours.
The only problem was the mayor and his staff were allegedly not on that email list, despite Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) thinking they were.
Escalating in tone, the initial emails from AEM duty officer Andrew Peteru on Thursday, January 26, at 8.57pm, warned of 70 to 100mm of rain beginning to fall from 6am the next morning.
The “significant rainfall” the email forecasted “may cause streams and rivers to rise rapidly. Surface flooding and slips are also possible and driving conditions may be hazardous”.
By Friday morning at 10.11am, the severe weather warning in another email from Peteru was now in red type.
“Expect 50 to 80mm of rain, especially in the east and north, with thunderstorms possible. This amount is in addition to the rain that has already fallen.”
The final AEM weather warning email the mayor and his staff failed to receive addressed Brown directly by name.
Below the email subject line was the label “Importance: High”.
“Auckland Emergency Management has activated in response to severe weather affecting Auckland right now,” it opens.
A spokesperson from the mayor’s office said at the time: “Unfortunately, no. Neither the mayor nor his staff were on the AKGEOC (Auckland Civil Defence and Emergency Management Team) email distribution list.”
Mayoral staff were understood to be “screaming” at their computers searching for internally sent email alerts and updates.
The Herald can reveal Brown now claims AEM committed an even greater administrative error on January 27.
“You missed the best story … none of the people from AEM rang me,” he says.
“The interesting thing was amongst all [those calls], not one of them was AEM ringing me. That was the story and you missed it. If they don’t ring you and they don’t tell you, what am I supposed to know?
“They rang the Wayne Brown that they had but that wasn’t me. They weren’t organised. That was the end of that story.”
Brown is referring to the call log and list of texts he made across the 48-hour period of January 27 and 28 on his official council phone that were obtained by the Herald under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA).
Coincidentally, there is another council staff member called Wayne Brown who works for AEM.
Newsroom reported in April last year, that the Wayne Brown in AEM regularly received emails intended for the new mayor.
“As mayor I had received no briefing on AEM processes when I was appointed and wasn’t even aware that their head office was at Bledisloe House. I was not on the email list for emergency alerts, nor did anyone at AEM have my phone number,” Brown says
The log of Brown’s official council mobile phone registers eight calls and 21 texts during a 48-hour period.
By the time he was in his Albert Street office at 4.13pm, Brown allegedly only had three calls until midnight January 27.
“You saw my calls, those were the private ones and the public ones. Nobody rings me much,” Brown said speaking months later.
“Nobody was [in touch with me]. You saw that. Go back and read it. Who rang me? Nobody rang me that had anything to do with that. That’s the interesting part.”
This last observation may not be entirely accurate.
The Herald also revealed in March 2023 that Brown was using a private number on the night as well as his council-assigned phone.
Auckland Council’s executive and official information teams said they “expect” access to this private phone which would not typically be subject to the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act.
A council source said in March 2023 that the mayor used both personal and official council phones to discuss governance issues: “I think it’s just a matter of which phone he picks up”.
“He started his job with his phone number and the question I actually don’t know is when he swapped over.”
‘A situation I’ve never seen before’
Aside from the AEM communications debacle, there were many other more direct indicators shortly after 4pm that the city was entering an emergency.
Between 4 and 5pm, more than 50 council Hydrotel flood warning alarms were triggered by heavy rainfall across Auckland.
At 5.07pm, a Fire and Emergency NZ press release said Fenz had received more than 400 emergency calls and “every fire truck in Auckland is responding to the priority calls”.
The region was about to see 71mm of rain dumped in the space of an hour, and around 250mm in parts of the city over 24 hours.
One senior Auckland firefighter who started his shift at 6pm on January 27 revealed to the Herald that by the time he got in his truck they were only responding to jobs that were life-threatening.
“It’s a situation I’ve never seen before. I’ve been in the job for 35 years and I’ve been to a lot of flooding over the years but I’ve never seen flooding like that and the calls that Fenz were responding to,” the firefighter said.
“They decided themselves that they were only going to go to life-threatening calls, so all the other flooding calls just for property flooding were ignored. They didn’t say that publicly but that’s what they did, because they didn’t have the resources. I reckon they made that call very early on in the piece.”
The first direct conversation the mayor had notifying him of the full magnitude of the flooding was a call at about 4.30pm from Auckland Councillor Shane Henderson, who was on the ground helping in his west Auckland ward of Waitākere.
In a combative interview the next morning at the West Harbour Fire Station, Brown described the conversation as evidence of his engagement with the evolving rain situation “on the ground”.
Henderson’s own memory was less precise about what he told the mayor.
“I did call the mayor, as he’s referenced a few times in interviews, to say ‘look, it’s getting really gnarly out here and, you might want to keep an eye on it and you might want to sort of assemble civil defence to see what they can do,” Henderson said.
“But I can’t even remember the exact words of the conversation because it was just such an intense time. To be honest, man, with the rain heaving it down and I’m being asked to direct traffic with fire and emergency crews off rescuing people off roads and stuff. I was sort of just trying to save people from, you know, injury or death.”
Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson, who was to become so prominent in the following days as the most available public voice fronting media questions on behalf of Auckland Council, had her own hectic Friday, amid which she gradually realised the severity of the floods.
Simpson had flown back from a holiday in Spain the night before and had planned for a couple of days rest to get over jet lag.
That Friday morning, she had to venture from her nearby Parnell home to speak at a Holocaust memorial at Auckland Museum.
“Of course, inside the museum you have no idea whether it’s sunny, rainy or whatever.
“There was a whole lot of water in the carpark. And I thought, wow, that’s a bit unusual.”
Simpson says she decided to avoid a basement park as her electric blue Porsche 911 was very low to the ground.
“As I drove out three hours later, I could see the Domain cricket fields filling up with water.”
Shortly after this, Simpson rang the mayor’s office to get a gauge of how the rain situation was being handled.
“Actually it was Max [Hardy] ... he said ‘oh, look, I’ve got to go, the mayor’s come in’ and I thought great because if it’s trouble, he’s around. It was about four … And the rest, as they say, is history.”
Isolation on the 27th floor
The mayor’s office says staff were waiting on advice from the authorities from shortly after 4pm.
Whether through indecision or a sense of restraint to avoid being an added burden, they were not demanding urgent updates.
But as the crucial hours after 5pm ticked by, the group on the 27th floor office realised Auckland Emergency Management and Fenz did not have a handle on the situation.
Hardy says the “key request” of the mayor from AEM was simply to remain available to be briefed about the situation at 6.15pm and 8.30pm.
“So we did want to seek the information through what we thought would be the official channels rather than act on anecdotal information that we were receiving. But he [Brown] was keeping in touch with various councillors and about what was happening.“
In fact, frantic communications between the emergency service agencies were already occurring - which often excluded council executives entirely.
It is striking how early in the day they were canvasing a possible state of emergency across the region.
At just 5.10pm, both Fenz and police were corresponding with an AEM controller about the “threshold for declaration of emergency”. The controller responded that “it’s an evolving situation”.
AEM general manager Paul Amaral said in those same exchanges “declaration something we should consider as doesn’t seem to be getting better, potential loss of life and need to evacuate”.
With a sigh, Hardy gets to the crux of the error in communication in and out of the mayor’s office that night - as they saw it.
“The mayor’s bias was to trust the experts. This comes through quite heavily in the press conference he gave [the next morning] which is: ‘I’ve relied on the experts and tried not to get in their way, right’.
“So they are clearly struggling with getting on top of the scenario. They didn’t need us sort of shouting at them and asking every five minutes for more information.”
The mayor is less delicate around the performance of AEM staff on the night.
“Occasionally, they’d ring and say, they’re thinking about [declaring] an emergency but they haven’t made a decision yet. They’re going to have a meeting at 8.30pm. So we waited around. Then they said, no we’re not going to do it yet.
“And so I just do what I was told to do, mate.”
While the mayor was independently capable of taking the initiative to declare a region-wide state of emergency, it’s clear that personal authority was not foremost in his mind.
“I assumed the people who had been working in this for months, preparing, would know what they were doing,” Brown said.
“I was quite surprised to find that the reason they delayed was because the first three emergency places [hubs] they set up flooded. They didn’t tell me that until later.
“So I’m thinking: ‘I don’t have much confidence in these people’. But that’s their job. There you go.”
At 5.45pm AEM posted on Facebook that it would “stay in touch” regarding the evolving weather situation. This post received 340 comments, but there was no further response by AEM until 10.01pm that evening.
MP refused entry to command centre
Auckland Central Green MP Chloe Swarbrick was also becoming increasingly frustrated at the information void.
She had that Friday just exited a stint of Covid isolation and was visiting her little sister with her babies in Balmoral during the afternoon.
Like the mayor’s apartment, Swarbrick’s electoral office was on K Road at the elevated southern edge of Auckland’s CBD.
“Things were getting pretty full on. Dominion Road had not looked good as well, but it still wasn’t very clear... what we were facing except for just a lot of rain.”
Once back in her office, Swarbrick hit the phones.
While her exact call logs from the night are long gone, the first text she sent to Brown was from 6.30pm.
“I texted him asking about ‘a contact for CDM’ which would have been civil defence emergency management, and he said that he was in briefings then,” Swarbrick said.
“Then tried my luck with the frontline firefighters ... I got the intel from them about the fact that they had for hours been at full capacity and that was when I realised just how full noise it was.”
“[The information] kind of wasn’t quite getting out and then I’m a third party sitting outside of that.”
One example of this communication blockage was NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi’s decision to stop live Twitter and online updates just after 8pm.
Waka Kotahi has already revealed that a team leader came back from annual leave to resume online updates after Minister of Transport Michael Wood said at 9.01pm that night he had “instructed the agency to re-open their channels urgently”.
Documents obtained under Official Information reveal there was only one Waka Kotahi social media operator on that evening, whose shift lasted from 10:30am to 7.50pm.
Meanwhile, Swarbrick’s attempts to get information out of the mayor, the executive of Auckland Emergency Management and “a range of top dogs” at Fenz were hitting a wall.
“That’s when I was, like, all right, chucked on my raincoat and my boots and I went down to the Fenz building. The people who I had been calling were basically like ‘whoa, whoa, whoa [you’re not coming in]’. I was like, again, I’m not here to be difficult, I just need clear information. I’ve sat on the sidelines in many of these kinds of environments. Then I was kind of turned away.”
It was now about 8pm. Swarbrick had approached the Fenz command centre located behind the Pitt Street CBD fire station. Inside were representatives from AEM, Civil Defence and Fenz top brass.
“I was really perplexed about what seemed like the disconnect, where on the front lines talking to the firefighters, they were slammed,” Swarbrick says.
“And then you walk into the Fenz building and everyone’s just kind of like … I get that it’s not just sitting around, but it kind of looks like sitting around, and some holding message can be delivered to [the public] in that time.”
Swarbrick’s account of the dislocation of frontline firefighters from the Fenz management was no distortion of reality.
A Fenz press release at 5.07pm that night said “every fire truck in Auckland is responding to the priority calls”.
This directly contradicted the statements of the top official that night, Auckland regional manager Ron Devlin, who the day after the downpour in a January 28 press conference indicated the situation was under control early that Friday afternoon.
Devlin said they didn’t recommend declaring a state of emergency at 6pm because it “didn’t feel at that time it was needed”.
Yet, one senior Auckland firefighter who started his shift at 6pm on January 27 said by the time he got in his truck they were only responding to life-threatening jobs.
“A lot of the guys were up to their chests getting to it. You know, we’d get called to an address and most of the time we couldn’t get to that address. We’d have to stop the truck well short.”
“A fairly accurate ‘oh s**t’”
Up in the mayor’s office, there was a point that Auckland Council director of governance Phil Wilson realised this night was different from a typical Auckland flood.
The city floods almost annually in the low-lying West Auckland region around Massey, where there is a collection of questionably situated new housing developments.
But this time the geographical breadth of the different emergency reports they were receiving alarmed Wilson.
“There was an indication of rain on the way, but not an indication of anything remotely, approaching the severity of what we had.
“Because more often than not, we have quite localised things. (This time) you could look out the window and it was still early enough for us to expect a summer evening, but it was quite dark and it was still p***ing down.”
“So (I was) starting to think, ‘oh s**t’. And it’s probably a fairly accurate ‘oh s**t’.
Wilson says he thinks this impression came around 6.30pm.
By this time, Fenz has registered 500 calls for help. Things escalate from then on.
At 6.15pm, the mayor says he received his first briefing from AEM and was “advised that emergency services were coping and didn’t need a declaration of emergency. Fire and Emergency supported this advice at the time. AEM did not get in touch again for another three hours.”
At 7pm the Elton John concert is officially cancelled, but most of the 40,000 ticket holders are already in the open air grounds of Mt Smart Stadium.
The mayor complains “it should have been closed earlier” to Auckland Councillor Sharon Stewart, the Emergency Management Committee chair.
One Herald journalist dropped off at Mt Smart for the concert recalls how she was nervous having her 1-year-old in the car for the journey. She could barely see out the windscreen.
“We had to take our sneakers off to wade through knee-deep, newly formed lakes. It was freezing, people were in wetsuits. I remember thinking, ‘surely the concert will be cancelled’ but I kept checking online for updates and there was no sign of it.”
After the event was cancelled minutes later, the journalist says she was lucky to catch an Uber as thousands lined up for buses unable to reach the stadium stops due to road closures.
“We couldn’t get out of Onehunga, let alone on the motorway to get back out to West Auckland. Every road we tried we ran into water - the car would have been fully submerged had we kept going. We were driving around for about two hours and I felt sorry for the driver.”
At 7.30pm, a body is found in the suburb of Wairau Valley on the city’s North Shore - the first of four deaths.
Just a few minutes later, a landslide on Shore Road, Remuera, leaves one person missing.
This turned out to be Dave Lennard - a respected mechanical expert and long-time volunteer at the city’s Museum of Transport and Technology (Motat) and the second person to die in the floods.
Lennard’s son is also in the house at the time of the slip, and manages to escape despite being initially trapped by one of his legs.
By 8pm, the Northern Motorway and the Waterview Tunnel in the inner west have flooded. Footage emerges online of half-submerged buses still carrying passengers.
By 8.35pm Fenz has received more than 1000 calls for help. Shortly afterwards, a MetService briefing predicts further torrential rain over the next two to three hours up to 120mm, with localised downpours of high intensity.
Evacuations are now in full swing. People are being housed at Waitakere Fire Station and Henderson Police Station.
Surf lifeguards rescue 69 people from the North Shore using inflatable boats. Fifty people have been evacuated from rest homes. Forty-three people are trapped in Kumeu.
At 8.37pm, Auckland Airport is closed to all flights, with people trapped in the international terminal and the carpark flooded.
At 8.50pm police advise there is another unverified fatality.
At 8.55pm, the controller of the AEM hub advises he alerted the mayor ‘a couple of hours ago’ regarding a state of emergency declaration and will ‘call him straight away to set this in motion. And that’s what my recommendation will be’.
At 9.15pm, Auckland Councillor Josephine Bartley emails all the council governing body including the mayor and Hardy.
“Dear Max and Mayor, declare a state of emergency now. I’m getting families from Mangere area asking me what to do because their homes are flooded …. They’re sitting ducks. Where are the evacuation sites to let people know where to go?”
North Shore Councillor Richard Hills responds: “The floods and slips are something I’ve never seen before, and we cannot update our communities through official channels because the official Auckland CDEM channel’s last update posts were more than three hours ago.”
At 9.25pm the declaration is brought to the mayor and it is signed at 9.27pm, marked by a time stamped photo taken by Wilson - who also facilitated the AEM staff to enter the Albert St building and run the mayor through the official signing process.
Deputy Mayor Simpson emails “Thank God!”.
Between the point of crisis identified by Wilson shortly after 6pm, and the eventual declaration of emergency at 9.27pm, there was a kind of waiting game in the mayor’s office that has since been heavily criticised.
Just like Hardy, Wilson says the Albert St building was “quiet” and empty of staff.
He admits there was a sense of isolation up there.
“To be really clear, I didn’t have an operational role in terms of emergency management,” Wilsons says.
“But the people who did were working remotely and accessible.”
Wilson, who is now the Auckland Council chief executive, says he felt the rapid report into all aspects of the emergency response, delivered by former police commissioner Mike Bush, vindicated the mayor somewhat against the accusation he lacked leadership.
“We, organisationally, didn’t serve him as well as we might have,” Wilson says of the council.
But the chief executive concedes Brown could have spoken publicly earlier than he did.
“Could he [Brown] be, have been more demanding [of information out of AEM], pressure us? Possibly,
“You know, I mean I can’t speak for the mayor but, when you’re used to kind of managing things, you’re inclined to jump in.
“But that’s not the way that emergency management works. It’s got to necessarily be quite disciplined. So the frustration was, you know, the lack of a full picture, comprehensive information.”
Seeing out a ‘horrible night’
The staff at the AEM city control centre only met the mayor in person later that night, arriving at the council’s Albert St headquarters for an 11.14pm media briefing.
In his opening lines, the mayor said that “thousands of Auckland emergency workers are putting themselves at risk across the region tonight”.
“This is going to be a horrible night.”
Brown identified that “in particular” the declaration enabled emergency workers to carry out and enforce evacuation procedures for the public.
He said he made the declaration “immediately” after getting the advice to do so from the AEM duty controller.
“It would not have been appropriate for me to act before that point,” Brown says.
The mayor swiped his key card to leave the Albert St offices at 12.33am that morning.
At 12.38am that night a second body was found in Wairau Valley.
Reflecting on the errors of the night, and what has changed in the subsequent 12 months, Wilson singles out the procedural hurdles required for the mayor to declare an emergency.
“I was party to some fairly intense conversations about the declaration process.
“The decision to declare an emergency - something that had never happened in Auckland’s history by the way - there’s a technical basis to it. It’s supposed to be used when emergency services advise us that they can no longer cope.
“And I think at the time, what we failed to appreciate was the importance of declaration for the purposes of communicating the severity of this to the community and its symbolic value.
“We would handle it differently now and have different operating procedures for that as a direct consequence of that, and the advice to the mayor would be different.”
With a self-deprecating laugh, Hardy describes the night as producing “only a little bit of post-traumatic stress disorder”.
Brown, for his part, is less magnanimous about the scrutiny that came on him in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
“Then you lot [the media] behaved like fools the next day. No, it wasn’t [reasonable scrutiny], it was stupid. You’ve [the media] got to accept some level of responsibility.”
Many months on, he steadfastly rejected the suggestion that his communication style on the night, or in the days following, lacked a human touch.
“I’m an engineer. Ask me engineering questions. Not how I feel. It’s bulls**t,” Brown says.
“We’ve had five years of a prime minister [Jacinda Ardern] who did nothing but empathy. Do you think we feel good about her? People don’t want empathy, they want the roads fixed, they want stuff done.”
“Between the time Auckland Council emergency managers stood up an incident team at 4.30pm and the first briefing I received at 6.15pm, the damage had been done. It was a monumental system failure and no one individual is at fault. This is something that was completely lost on media in the plethora of disaster reporting.
“Let’s hope we all learn to do better next time, me included.”
Wilson asks for realistic expectations from the public regarding future emergency responses, and an acceptance of the magnitude of the storm event on January 27, 2023.
“I can honestly say that were something similar to happen again, I think we’re a lot better prepared. My worry… I think people have to appreciate, the very unusual and severe nature of this event. If we had... 250-300ml of rain in a short period of time in the region on that scale, again, I don’t think anyone should pretend that there won’t be impacts.
“It’s just that, by God, we’ll be better at managing it.”
Tom Dillane is an Auckland-based journalist covering local government and crime as well as sports investigations. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is deputy head of news.