Source: Radio New Zealand
A ute submerged at Robert Prescott’s home on Phillips Road in Ōtorohanga on February 14. RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Once-in-a-hundred-year storms are coming thick and fast, and the number of states of emergency declared across the country has skyrocketed.
New Zealand isn’t just bracing for emergencies – it’s declaring them at a pace never seen before.
In 2002, across the country, only four days of local states of emergency were declared. In the first two months of this year alone, there have been at least 70.
That stark comparison comes as councils around the country deal with the devastating impact of a powerful, lasting and deadly storm that first hit Ōtorohanga and Waipa districts hard and carried on down the country.
Today, The Detail looks at what it means to be under a local state of emergency, and what goes on behind the scenes at MetService when it issues a weather warning.
Lakes District councillor and Joint Centre for Disaster Research capability development manager Jon Mitchell, who has been involved with emergency management both here and overseas for 30 years, puts the spike in states of emergency down, in part, to climate change. But he also says it’s due to weather services getting better at forecasting, and a culture change which has encouraged authorities to declare early.
“If you wait until the events occur, you lose much of the benefit of being able to declare a state of emergency,” Mitchell tells The Detail.
A graphic provided by National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) showing the state of emergencies in New Zealand since 2017. Image: NEMA NEMA
“When [a declaration] is made at the local level, it automatically has a seven-day period, which can be extended – we have seen that happen with major events recently – and it does several things. It enables those appointed as regional or group controllers … to have special powers to intervene in the emergency.
“It also enables police officers to have those powers where there is a need to act even faster, perhaps, in particular if there isn’t communication and there may only be police with a degree of authority on the ground,” Mitchell says.
“So that’s the ability to require people to evacuate, to enter buildings, to remove vehicles that might be damaged and blocking streets, to clear roads, to close roads, to acquire resources through requisition, a whole range of things.
“But it also provides protection, too, to those involved in the response … sometimes to manage risks, you have to be prepared to take risks, so it enables people to have more confidence, who are responding, to do things they might need to do that they normally wouldn’t be able to do, outside of an emergency situation.”
He says legally, the bar for declaring a state of emergency is “quite low” – it can simply be “any incident that has occurred or may occur that threatens the safety of individuals or property”.
However, with the increasing number of emergencies being declared, does Mitchell worry that emergency fatigue will set in, causing the declarations to lose their urgency and public compliance to drop off?
“There has been quite a bit of research into this. And the impact of not declaring and leaving communities entirely to their own devices, or organisations to not act together in a coordinated way, communities tire of that much more quickly than they do of having an organised response supporting them.
“What we can’t do is hesitate, and hope that things are going to get better.”
He says people should have a plan to escape a dangerous situation as soon as possible. And have a pack ready, with water, food, a torch, and a radio, to listen to alerts and warnings.
“We need the public to be ready,” he says. “Being ready to move is essential, and having a plan about where you are going to go is critical too.”
Floo waters at Little River in Banks Peninsula this week. Cameron Gordon/Supplied
Eyes on the weather everywhere
While the wild weather has been bombarding many towns and cities outside, inside MetService’s Wellington headquarters forecasters have been inundated with all kinds of data that feeds into their predictions. Information sent in by the 200-odd weather stations from Cape Reinga to the Sub-Antarctic Islands can change by the minute, says meteorologist John Law.
“We’ve got computers, monitors everywhere with maps, webcam views of various bits and bobs around the country and these giant screens which are our situational awareness screens with the latest radar, the latest satellite images and some of the observations as well,” says Law.
“So [it’s] trying to keep us up to date with what’s happening now so we get a nice, firm idea of what’s going to happen in the future.”
When there’s severe weather the pressure steps up from journalists, airports, shipping companies and government agencies for latest information.
But unlike the external mayhem of the last week, Law says inside the national weather hub in Wellington it’s just the opposite. The office is “very quiet and very hardworking”.
Teams of weather specialists are working on aviation, marine and website information, and the lead forecaster is running the show like an orchestra conductor. Three times a day the group gathers for a ‘nod in’.
“This dates back to when the chief forecaster used to stand up and tell everyone what the forecast was going to be and the rest of the meteorologists would sit round and nod in agreement,” says Law.
The name has stuck, but he says the meetings are now more collaborative, with expert forecasters and other meteorologists having a say .
Some of the world’s biggest, most sophisticated computers enable meteorologists to see what’s going on as early as six weeks out but at that stage there are many uncertainties.
“That’s often one of the biggest challenges, is when we look at the forecast, particularly for three, four, five, six weeks away is there can be a lot of uncertainty. And as we’ve seen with just this big system of low pressure, where that exact path goes can have a real big impact on which areas see the most rainfall or which areas see the strongest winds.
“We want to make sure that when we issue severe weather warnings or alerts, we have high certainty they’ll come through. We want to make sure that we’re not crying wolf, as it were.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
