Auckland floods: Council chief executive Jim Stabback apologises, says communication with Aucklanders was not good enough

Auckland Council chief executive Jim Stabback (left) and governance director Phil Wilson fronted the media today on the damning Bush report into the January 27 floods. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Auckland Council chief executive Jim Stabback has apologised for the events that unfolded on the evening of the January 27 floods that claimed four lives, saying the response was not what Aucklanders should have expected.

“To the extent that those shortcomings are our accountability, I apologise for the extent to which we didn’t meet the expectations and needed to,” he said today.

Stabback said as he reflected on the evening, the clear shortcomings were the council’s communications with Aucklanders and standing up shelters and emergency facilities.

Auckland Council chief executive Jim Stabback, left, and governance director Phil Wilson, fronted the media today on the damning Bush report into the January 27 floods. Photo / Jason Oxenham

At a sitdown with a small group of journalists at the council headquarters, Stabback said the council was absolutely and fully committed to implementing the recommendations of the report by former police commissioner Mike Bush into the catastrophic floods.

The report, issued last Wednesday, found a “system failure” of leadership in the first 12 hours of the response in which “much of the damage was done” before Auckland Council or Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown had taken any action.

The report said senior leaders underestimated the importance of the need to be visible, which hampered communications and public confidence.

Asked about his decision to leave the council offices at about 4.45pm on the evening of the floods, Stabback said in hindsight it looked like a mistake, “but in the moment, I didn’t know what I didn’t know”.

He said the report recorded he sent a text to the mayor at 4.26pm in relation to some flooding at Rānui and Henderson “and I said in that text, ‘The weather is expected to abate’”.

“That, in fact, was what we thought was going to happen. That was the advice we had from MetService. At 4.45pm, we didn’t have a good, joined-up picture of the impact across Auckland … and I left the office and I headed home.

“Of course, the other thing I didn’t know was what was about to happen over the next two or three hours.

“It was clear by five-thirty, six o’clock, the situation was much more serious as we started to get a more coherent picture. As I said, I considered coming back into the office, but then I was online, I was on the phone, I was engaged with Phil [Wilson, governance director] and other people … and it would probably have taken an hour to get back in the office,” he said.

Stabback’s understanding of the seriousness of the situation was somewhat at odds with Wilson, who said there was “scrambling on a massive scale” from roading, stormwater, fire and police crews from mid-afternoon, which “accelerated quickly”.

Asked if the council should have known by mid-afternoon that this was a really serious event, Wilson said: “We should have.”

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has apologised twice for the response to the floods. Photo / Jed Bradley

Stabback’s apology followed two apologies by Brown - one a week after the floods when he admitted he “dropped the ball”, and again on TVNZ’s Q&A on Sunday, where he said lives lost during the floods were due to poor planning and the council should have been more visible earlier in the evening.

Stabback said he agreed with the mayor to develop a plan between now and the middle of May to implement the 17 recommendations in the Bush report, some of which were already under way prior to the report being issued.

Others, he said, would take longer, because they will be best implemented within a national framework or in co-ordination with the National Emergency Management Agency (Nema).

Wilson, the member of Stabback’s executive leadership team on deck at the council headquarters during the day and throughout the evening of the floods, said the Bush report highlighted the events in a “glaring way”.

He said the most practical way now was to take the report, its finding and recommendations on the chin, and get on with implementing changes.

A team, including some independent consultants, is going through the report and, by the end of this week, will have prioritised the recommendations for a work programme to implement it, Wilson said.

Former police commissioner Mike Bush released a damning report into the floods last Wednesday. Photo / Herald

Some of the obvious things that need working on, said Wilson, were the slowness in setting up evacuation centres and problems stemming from a lack of intelligence coming through to Auckland Emergency Management (AEM), to understand the depth and breadth of what was happening.

“That did compromise a number of people, including the chief executive and the mayor … and some of the public communications,” Wilson said.

He said the mindset at the council has been it can expect serious but more localised events, but it was the breadth of the Auckland Anniversary floods that caught the organisation out.

The council has 32 staff employed full-time in AEM and a further seven trained and accredited duty controllers in other jobs who can be called upon in an emergency. Small crews can be stood up at any time and the numbers can be expanded as needed.

One of the recommendations in the Bush report is for the council to hire more qualified emergency response staff, including experts in public information.

Stabback, who announced on February 22 he was resigning midway through a five-year term for “personal reasons”, said the floods played no part in the decision to step down.