Our team of 23 is made up of a wide range of mostly council staff plus one from NEMA. They do a mix of day jobs, a few full time CDEM staff with other staff having day jobs covering planning, administration, events, management, PR/comms, data analysis. We also have rural outreach personnel who are not council staff and true volunteers in that they are not being paid for their deployment.
Our surge team comes from Palmerston North, New Plymouth, South Taranaki, Wellington, Hamilton, Cambridge, Christchurch, South Canterbury, Invercargill, Blenheim, Rotorua and Timaru, men and women ranging from enthusiastic young folks to those who have been around a little longer. This is the strength of Local Government, we all understand pubic service and most have varying levels of training in CDEM “Coordinated Incident Management System”.
As expected, the logistics of moving a diverse group of people from around the country isn’t easy. By breakfast at Whenuapai we had gotten to know each other fairly well even if we hadn’t quite remembered everyone’s names. Thanks to the cooks and staff at Wheneuapai who organised to put us up and fed us with about 20 minutes notice. The weather cleared and we were able to hitch a ride on the 2 “baby hercs” to Napier, with a pretty smooth run arriving midday. From there the aircraft relocated police staff back to Christchurch.
On the ground there was some confusion over who was going to which centre after a few of us received different info, and it turned out we were being split into 3 groups. I was in a group of 4 being redeployed to Central Hawkes Bay District Council Emergency Operations Centre in Waipawa. A motel sounded a bit more comfy than the HMNZS Canterbury and there were rumours of COVID doing the rounds on the ship, poor (no) cell reception inside, and trying to move people off the ship. In the circumstances we were quietly not disappointed about the redeployment.
The 2 other groups were going to Hastings EOC and the regional Emergency Coordination Centre. After some further transportation confusion, our personal transportation arrived in 2 vehicles. South Africans Amanda and “hubby” Jan (“yarn”) were local volunteers, not involved in civil defence. The kind of folks who organise a community fundraising while coaching the kids sports teams, working at the Lions op shop and baking for the elderly. Amanda had registered them as volunteers, and Jan had been doing long hours on a Chorus broadband contract starting on the fibre rebuild. And when they described rebuild, it was literally from scratch in many places. And on his day off he was volunteering as a civil defence driver, in is own ute paying for his own fuel. It’s this spirit that you see again and again in tough times with people pitching in.
We finally arrived at the EOC to find heavy rain. After a thorough briefing and set up, I was invited out for eyes on some local infrastructure. I was estatic to find my warehouse high viz rain jacket (hastily bought at the Rotorua 660 concert when we realised we hadn’t packed for the heaving rain) matched almost exactly the high viz of the local engineers. My matching orange coat made me now feel like a real operations member. And being a small council that just gets on with stuff, I also found out that ops manager and ops team are one and the same. With some possible intelligence thrown in, I was feeling quite at home. A whistle stop drive around the local rivers and roads showed elevated levels and minor surface flooding but thankfully no significant new issues from the rain, with the stopbank repairs and bunding for the Waipawa bore water supply pump holding up well. The issues from the cyclone are a complete other story…
Police awaiting their lift to Christchurch.
No comments:
Post a Comment