Disaster Awareness Week

Jim Higgins, CEO, Local Government Online

There’s little doubt that we are seeing some severe changes to our natural environment these days. It is also becoming clear that many of these changes are here to stay. So Tornados along the West coast of the North Island, once a surprising novelty, are now almost commonplace and to be expected on a regular - and somewhat devastating - basis. Descriptions such as 50 and 100 year floods have become almost meaningless as they occur not just once, but sometimes several times in the same year. Years in which we see our districts and cities knee deep in floodwater we find those same areas parched deserts subject to bushfires in the summer.

National Disaster Awareness week has brought these issues to the fore in our minds. Clearly there can be major catastrophes from which even the best prepared councils will struggle to recover but these tend, thankfully, to be few and far between. More common are the events with which we should be able to cope, but sadly many councils will find overwhelming.

Where a serious event stretches a territorial authority’s resources to or beyond their ability to cope, neighbouring councils and emergency services will always rally round to help. Unfortunately they will, more often than not, be faced with a dire lack of local knowledge and with information systems, if they do exist at all, for which they have had no training. Floods, earthquakes and bushfires are no respecters of local government boundaries and emergency response teams with disparate systems have to try to obtain information from each other in situations where they do not have the luxury of time to learn new processes.

Fortunately there are now councils in New Zealand with the vision to see and understand that the country needs a single Emergency Management system that can be operated across local government boundaries. It’s all very well to sit and argue that ‘central government should pay for this’ - we all know that they won’t! There are some that take the approach ‘it won’t happen on my watch’ - good luck with that! Almost more worrying are the people responsible for emergency management who are frightened of new technology, don’t want the jobs they know inside out to change or are apprehensive that a new system will do them out of a job. Sadly these people don’t appreciate that a system such as Readynet will actually enhance their capabilities and effectiveness many times over and at the same time demonstrate to their citizens that the council has their interests at heart and is doing something concrete to protect them from an ever increasing riskscape.

Let us hope, for all our sakes, that the change in understanding that we have observed over the past year, takes hold and accelerates.