How confusing information added to chaos

By JAMES GARDINER

The week of weather-related chaos has raised questions about the ability of councils and emergency services to cope with large-scale natural disasters.

Not only did the flooding destroy homes and farmland and kill stock, it cut power, gas, phone lines, water supplies and major roads and bridges.

Thousands of work days were lost as people stayed home to clean up, were kept from work by road closures, or could not do their normal jobs because the shop, office or farm was under water.

The follow-on effects were also painful. Hundreds of workers in Hawkes Bay found they were out of work when their factories had to shut down without the gas from the pipeline ruptured at Ashhurst.

Further downstream valuable export dollars will be lost because thousands of litres of milk had to be dumped and hundreds of dairy cows drowned at what should have been the most lucrative part of the milking season.

There were also unexpected complications for people in the process of buying or selling property affected by floods. One of those is Marion Ewing of Hunterville.

The sale of her house went unconditional three weeks ago but after 30cm of water flooded it on Sunday night and Monday, the sale is in doubt, even though insurance will cover the repairs.

There was a more widespread problem in the immediate aftermath of the deluge: working out who was in charge and what was happening. Road and rail closures were a prime example.

When the crowded Tranz Rail "Capital Connection" train left Palmerston North for Wellington early on Monday the rain had not stopped for 32 hours. But there was no suggestion the two-hour trip would be halted at Otaki before returning to Shannon, where the train became trapped by flooding in both directions.

Commuters were told they would not be able to drive beyond Paraparaumu, when in fact SH1 was open.

Lack of information and incorrect information was a recurring theme throughout the week.

People who had driven down roads found they were not allowed to return soon after. The people on the roadblocks were often civilians with no obvious official status apart from their fluoro-vests sporting roading company logos.

Private radio stations broadcast a mixture of news and anecdotes - stories about floods and road closures that proved incorrect.

"Some of those DJs seemed to be playing God," said Manawatu District Council information officer Bob Williams. But they were not the only ones. Civil defence authorities made decisions to close roads into badly hit Feilding on Monday even though at least one of the roads was passable.

The justification was to keep "rubber neckers" from Palmerston North out of Feilding but it caused problems for locals trying to get home - or get out.

More than six local councils dusted off civil defence emergency plans with varying degrees of success. In fairness to the radio stations, they were battling to get accurate information from a variety of sometimes conflicting sources.

By Wednesday the Manawatu-Wanganui regional council, Horizons MW, decided to assume overall responsibility for communications, with specialist advisers flown in from other centres.

Yesterday Horizons MW communications co-ordinator Linda Thompson reported that all media releases were being centrally scrutinised "so we're all singing from the same hymn sheet". But by then the worst of the disaster was over.