“Like a lot of things that come out of Gabrielle, it ... sort of presented the solutions or opportunities to really enhance the current system.”
He cited the Tairāwhiti Civil Defence Facebook page as an example. It now has a subscriber base of 25,000 people.
Green said at around the time of the cyclone, the subscriber base grew by 10,000 people in 24 hours.
“Not everyone’s a Facebook user. Some prefer websites, so we’re trying to create a connected environment or ecosystem for information.”
An interactive map of New Zealand is on the homepage. Users can click on the different information presented, such as weather alerts and road information, which highlight that layer of the map.
“The other layers we have added, which haven’t been there before, are where you can see tsunami zones and some of the floodplain overlays. You can locate schools, hospitals, where fire services are and key sites”.
During an emergency, they could also add a layer if they were activating an emergency or welfare centre.
The site was “easily configurable” and the office would continue to review it, Green said.
The website also links users to key sources of information, including flood monitoring. This is the most frequent and most likely event, so people can find information on river levels and cameras.
Green said they were also developing preparedness tools and there would soon be a science portal to “make it an interactive space that’s rich in content” for schools and individuals to draw from.
“The site will provide a conduit to where you can actually find more than just the front end. You can look at the depth of research and science that you can access in there as well.”
It would soon transition out of the Gisborne District Council website, where it was presently, and redirect traffic to the Temo website.
The site had not been overly “onerous” to put in place, as the developer had done similar sites for seven other regions, but Temo had “Gizzified it”, Green said.
One of those other regions was Auckland.
“If Auckland can deal with a population base of 1.5 million, then we’re not going to see an overload for what the website traffic would then have to accommodate.”
Green said another benefit was that Temo could switch on a low-data mode for the site, which in a severe weather scenario – when networks could be low – would only show critical information.
“So a lot of the design and build was quite intuitive because obviously it leverages the fact that the developers had a very high awareness in terms of what the site functionality needed to be.”
Green said he would “love” residents to save the site to their homepage: www.tairawhitiem.govt.nz.
