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There has been the furious reporting at home and abroad on the most significant earthquake to strike New Zealand for 80 years, but the real truth of the situation is far more serious and has impacts for the entire country, and people desperately need a dose of reality.
We are truly a fortunate country. The size of California (or the United Kingdom +10%), with a population of 4.5 million; we have lots of space, lots of natural resource and a fairly low population density even in our major cities. The fact we have no bordering nations - and are as far away from strife as one could get on this planet before hitting Antartica - makes us somewhat divorced from the global conflicts and pressures other countries experience.
But what really makes this country so lucky is the utter lack of any major disaster since... well since the supervolvanic Oruanui eruption that formed Lake Taupo almost 27,000 years ago. As a colleague of mine once commented "We don't practice emergency management in New Zealand... we practice INCOVENIENCE management."
Christchurch's 7.1 (depth 10km) earthquake on Saturday September 4th is an inconvenience on a global scale, although obviously an emergency to the 400,000 people who live in our 2nd-largest city. For a start, nobody died. Not a soul. Even though the epicentre of the quake was less than 40km away from the centre of a city that has buildings made of brick and stone that date back to the 1850s. Water was restored quickly to the majority of the city, although boil-water notices remained in place in some areas to prevent gastric illnesses and some of the sewerage network is still down. Electricity was restored to 99% of households within a week.
In addition our Earthquake Commission covers the first $100,000 of insurance for damage to insured properties with insurance companies covering the rest. Our government announced a $350/week per
employee payout to affected businesses with less than 20 staff, donations are flooding from all over the country and we have turned down assistance from both the USA and United Nations.
You will forgive me brashly stating that - in comparison to disasters elsewhere - this has been a major inconvenience, but hardly a serious emergency.
My concern is that New Zealanders will continue to believe that we are lucky and blithely march into the future saying "we can deal with emergencies... just look at the great work we did in Christchurch". In my opinion apathy, ignorance and false hope are as dangerous as poverty, instability and lack of infrastructure when it comes to disaster preparedness.
There is a solution, but it is complex. Obviously we want our communities to take responsibility in a holistic fashion and reduce reliance on externally-provided services; become more self-sufficient. The will is
there however there's a psychological blockage caused by the very people who are tasked to make this happen.
Since the 1950s New Zealand has had a Civil Defence network. Ask any New Zealand citizen what Civil Defence is and you will get one of 4.5 million different answers. To some, CD is a great army awaiting the call to action. For others, it's a complex governmental organisation that reaches the length and breadth of the country.
In reality Civil Defence is nothing more than an idea, embedded in the minds of the citizenry, creating a false sense of security. It's a task reluctantly accepted by local government who treat it like any other Council function. Just like our water and sewage systems nobody takes any notice of it unless it stops working. But you cannot treat emergency preparedness in that way because it MUST work EVERY time it is
needed. This is the reason people don't realise how tenuous and fragile their situation is.
How can we break free of this fantasy? Like the main character in the movie The Matrix the only solution is for individuals to wake up and see the truth.
New Zealanders are vulnerable. Not only because of our small economy, our isolation, the fact we are sitting on a supervolcano at the edge of the Ring of Fire... we are vulnerable because we continue to believe in the Civil Defence Fairy and say "She'll be right".
She won't be right - ever - until citizens of this country take a reality pill. Only then will New Zealand communities and businesses start working toward true resilience.
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(Press Release)
(Press Release) –
Access
When it comes to your property, what do you expect in case of loss (hurricane, tornado, earthquake, flood, fire, etc.)? The disaster itself is news. "What happens after the dust settles is the story: the aftermath shock," said author Antone P. Braga. " With a little curiosity, insurance policyholders can mitigate that shock, and gain emotional/mental preparedness—fortitude.
The ordinary insuring public now has access: basic rights and vital information—even footing, equality—the security of knowing what to expect in terms of disaster preparedness/recovery," Braga said.
For more general information, go to www.DisasterEquality.info.
# # #
CANTERBURY OBSERVATIONS Jon
CANTERBURY OBSERVATIONS
Jon Mitchell
The impact of the Canterbury earthquake and its aftershocks have had an incredibly galvanizing effect on all of the communities affected. Individual families, neighbourhoods, districts, regions, and response and recovery agencies were brought together like never before on that morning and the following days.
Community resilience proved to be alive and well in the affected parts of Canterbury. The willingness of members of the community to meet their own immediate needs first and then reach out to neighbours, enabled our communities to clamber back to their feet and support each other while local emergency agencies activated and organised their responses.
The willingness of volunteers from a wide range of organisations and community groups (themselves affected by the first and later quakes) to step up to their designated or ad-hoc roles was personally and professionally inspirational. The support provided by MCDEM staff along with staff from virtually every government agency, has been superb. Where issues did arise they were able to be dealt with in constructive, innovative and pragmatic ways.
During the week following the initial quake we witnessed an influx of volunteers from across the country to rapidly expand and then relieve local capabilities in emergency welfare, medical and public health, welfare and support, policing, engineering, building inspection, logistics support, and emergency response coordination, on a scale all too seldom seen in New Zealand.
For example for several shifts, the Canterbury Regional ECC was staffed by local government personnel, emergency management professionals, NZ Defence Force, emergency services, and partner agencies from regions including the Far North, Auckland, Waikato, Wellington, West Coast, Nelson Tasman, Otago and Southland – working seamlessly with colleagues from the Canterbury Regional EMO, Environment Canterbury and staff from less affected local authorities within Canterbury itself.
The influx of response and recovery staff did not go entirely without hitches, usually as a result of unilateral requests for resources and support, or actions otherwise circumventing agreed response and resource coordination processes. Although nobody suffered and only a few egos bruised, there is clearly a need to ensure that more coordinated approaches, using the mandated local-regionalnational
chain of coordination, are fully embedded in the immediate future.
As the Director has said in his editorial, there will be lessons to learn from this event and the various individual and collective responses to it. The Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery
Act is an immediate indication of the validity of concerns raised by the Canterbury CDEM Group in the past about the appropriateness of interpretation of the CDEM Act by some agencies in relation to emergencies or disasters of the scale of this earthquake – or worse.
This event has made it quite clear that some authorities need to take earthquake risk and resilience more seriously in decisions they make
about the location, design and resourcing of their response and/or coordination capabilities. While some were able to immediately activate and begin to carry out their designated functions, others were compromised for quite some time, adding to personnel and organisational stress and reducing the effectiveness of decision-making processes.
The historic national tendency to hold emergency management capability and governance to a relatively low common-denominator, by international standards, and to invest too little in nationally-consistent and managed training and education, resulted in initial responses to this event being not as well vertically or horizontally integrated or coordinated as they could have been.
We, as the wider-national emergency management community, need to take the opportunity afforded by this disaster to honestly and thoroughly review our collective legislation, plans, and capabilities, as well as supporting training and education, to ensure that we are sufficiently ready in future for even more challenging events.
The influence of local political agendas, interagency disconnects, and the ill-ease within many territorial authorities with the regional model introduced by the CDEM Act itself cannot be underestimated. The real challenge will be whether we will be able to address these issues honestly and constructively to ensure that our communities receive the protection they expect and deserve.
(Opinion piece from the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management Impact Newsletter: http://www.civildefence.govt.nz/memwebsite.nsf/Files/Impact%20Vol/$file/Impact-vol39.pdf )