Nearly 1000 pages of documents show chaotic scenes at Auckland Council when the city was hit with the record-breaking January floods.
Emails and communication from January 27 have been released to RNZ.
They detail conversations involving Mayor Wayne Brown and councillors, senior staff within the council, and Auckland Emergency Management.
A review of the council’s response to the Anniversary Weekend floods found its emergency management response was slow, ill-prepared and unfit to respond to a major storm. A record amount of rainfall in the city left four dead and hundreds of homes and businesses damaged.
The documents show at 5.54pm, Hibiscus and Bays Local Board deputy chair Julia Parfitt had emailed Brown, councillors, and the council’s emergency team to alert them to widespread flooding in low-lying areas of the North Shore, raw sewage on Hibiscus Coast and failing wastewater pumping stations.
Half an hour later she appealed for messaging to the public, with high tide due overnight. “People need to shift valuables, particularly cars to high ground,” she wrote.
In response, an Auckland Council official shared screenshots of Auckland Emergency Management’s Twitter account and said most people in low-lying areas were facing issues.
“The latest advice from Auckland Emergency Management is to stay in place, if safe. Call 111 if life is endangered. I understand that all emergency services are extremely stretched at present.”
Brown took and made a number of phone calls and forwarded emails to his chief of staff.
The documents show he was having problems with his work iPad and wanted it fixed, but the on-duty IT person was dealing with their own flooded home.
Eventually, someone else was called in but it appeared the mayor’s iPad was out of action for at least an hour.
State of emergency
At 9.09pm Brown’s chief of staff Max Hardy updated councillors on what the mayor had been doing, saying he had been in his office receiving regular updates from Emergency Management.
“He is awaiting imminent advice on whether a declaration of a state of local emergency is required or useful... The Mayor will also be seeking assurances that evacuation procedures are in place and communicated if required overnight.”
In an email, he asked councillors to share only official information with their communities.
In response, councillor Josephine Bartley started a series of emails asking Hardy and the mayor to immediately declare a state of emergency.
Residents were “sitting ducks”, she wrote.
“They ring 111 and are told that emergency services are overloaded and can’t get to them right now. Then I have people who have self-evacuated contacting me about where can they go for the night as their homes are underwater now. Where are the evacuation sites to let people know where to go?”
Fuli started ringing around churches to see if they were taking people in.
Other councillors were asking about whether Auckland Transport was closing roads.
Julie Fairey asked if Eden Park might be used as an evacuation centre, clearly not knowing it too was underwater.
The independent review panel found the state of emergency should have been announced earlier, panel head Mike Bush said, as most of the damage was done in the first few hours and that was not known to officials. The mayor on Wednesday, responding to the review, said he accepted its recommendations, was committed to fixing the problems and planned to increase the budget for Auckland Emergency Management.
Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson said communication in events since - including Cyclone Gabrielle - showed the council had already improved its emergency response systems.
