Hawke's Bay leaders speak to the findings of the Cyclone Gabrielle review.
Video / Mark Story
Public backlash against the performance of emergency management in the Cyclone Gabrielle crisis led to some leaving their jobs and even the Hawke’s Bay region, according to the Bush inquiry.
In the overview, the review team, headed by former Commissioner of Police Mike Bush, said that just as local communities continue to grieve and suffer as they move towards recovery, the local councils’ emergency management staff have also been traumatised, and many had resigned.
Review leader Mike Bush delivering the report on Monday. It found the region’s Civil Defence and Emergency Management group was not prepared for the disaster. Photo / Warren Buckland
“Some have left the region altogether as a result of public backlash, amplified in a region with many small, close-knit communities,” it said. “Councils are finding it hard to recruit their replacements.”
A spokesperson for Hawke’s Bay CDEM Group said its office has 15 staff.
“In the last 12 months, there have been three new staff and two that have left.
“In Hawke’s Bay, the civil defence emergency response system also incorporates a number of other organisations, including the region’s five councils. There will obviously be additional staff who have left each of the councils over the last 12 months, some of whom will also have been included in the summary in the Independent Review.”
The review said it is a “profoundly counterintuitive feature of New Zealand’s emergency management system that, as a crisis builds, and a declaration of emergency made, the command and co-ordination function goes to local council staff”.
But while they may be “well-intentioned about their roles, they are inconsistently trained in the national Co-ordinated Incident Management System (CIMS), often lack operational experience and, as response moves into recovery, have full-time day jobs with which to contend,” the report said.
“Given their modest resources, it was always going to be challenging for local authorities in Hawke’s Bay to carry the depth of capability and operational experience needed to lead a response to an event such as this.
“This is in spite of the fact that the region has a more centralised approach to emergency management than many and an atypically large number of full-time civil defence staff,” the report said.
The highly-anticipated review into Hawke's Bay Civil Defence's response to Cyclone Gabrielle was released this week. Photo / NZME
The Hawke’s Bay CDEM team was considered “quite large by national standards”, although Central Hawke’s Bay and Wairoa had no full-time staff, with staff trained in some civil defence aspects as part of their wider council roles.
The report says it is important in the wake of the disaster to consider the “recruitment proposition and ongoing support for staff in these ‘reserve army’ roles”.
“Many described to us the constant stress of having the ‘CDEM phone’ by their beds and being available 24/7 in the event of an emergency,” it says.
One was quoted as saying: “No matter what we do it will never be enough because we aren’t experienced professionals in emergency stuff. It’s like we are being set up to fail in this and the pressure and scrutiny sometimes feel unbearable.”
