Flooding from Cyclone Gabrielle isolated many Hawke's Bay communities.
Flooding from Cyclone Gabrielle isolated many Hawke's Bay communities.
Hawke’s Bay’s disaster response rulebook is likely to be rewritten.
That’s probably the nuts and bolts of what to expect from a review of the performance of the Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence Emergency Management (HBCDEM) Group during Cyclone Gabrielle.
The devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle was on a scale that the existing system couldn’t withstand, so - regardless of the outcome of the review, which is due to be delivered in December - moves are already under way to change it.
In Central Hawke’s Bay (CHB), that process began months ago.
HBCDEM Joint Committee member and CHB Mayor Alex Walker convened meetings in 10 locations. The first priority was to ascertain what residents experienced during February’s weather event.
Central Hawke's Bay Mayor Alex Walker (right) meets with Prime Minister Chris Hipkins in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle.
The HBCDEM review will not include a formal region-wide process for the public to directly contribute. Instead, in districts such as CHB and Hastings, council staff have collated public feedback which they will now feed into the review.
The second purpose of those meetings in CHB was to determine a model for the future.
“And every part of our community that we went to said, ‘We want to be more resilient ourselves at a community level and not reliant on others’,” Walker told Hawke’s Bay Today.
“What can we do to be more organised at that level, and what support can councils or Civil Defence provide to get them to that point?
“Communities want to be more resilient and more prepared themselves, and we need to figure out how to do that.”
The scale of emergencies vary. Some can be managed at a household and community level, Walker said. Others at a district or regional level.
The severity of Cyclone Gabrielle was such that a state of emergency was declared and the National Emergency Management Agency was brought in.
“The co-ordination of all those moving parts was a challenge, so that’s what this review is looking to get to the bottom of,” said Walker.
“Who played what role? How effective was it? Did it meet the existing expectations, and how could it have been done better?”
Walker has asked for a timeline to be included in the review, detailing events in the 24 hours before Cyclone Gabrielle hit and 48 hours afterwards. She said some people are still grieving over February’s events, and hopes a thorough catalogue of when and why things happened can provide some closure.
“It overwhelmed the whole region from top to bottom, and it meant that, basically, the rules were thrown out, almost,” she said.
Alex Walker wants Hawke's Bay residents to have a detailed understanding of this region's cyclone response.
Which is why she says this region might need different rules in order to achieve a different outcome the next time disaster strikes.
“Part of what this review needs to bring together is a picture that connects Hawke’s Bay again, because we lost all our roading lifelines and our communication lifelines - there was no phone, no radio, no power, no nothing,” Walker said.
“It means we all went through it separately and don’t necessarily understand the whole story, because we all experienced something so different.
“This has to bring that together so that everyone can understand the complexity of that extraordinary set of experiences.
“We have to deliver a system of emergency management that is co-ordinated in the face of an emergency and that people have confidence in, from the small things to the big things.”
Such as worrying what they’ll wake up to, every time they hear rain on the roof at night.
“That is a big responsibility that we take very seriously.”
