Flooding and slash at Tolaga Bay on 13 February 2023. File photo. Photo: Supplied/ Uawa Civil Defence
Urban Search and Rescue teams are relying on just three trucks, two of them so old they keep breaking down and pose risks because they lack basic stability control (ABS).
OIA papers show Fire and Emergency has been slow to get its specialist USAR teams the trucks and utes they need despite the growing demands for specialist rescue work nationwide, fuelled by climate change.
In an email from the day Cyclone Gabrielle hit in February, a senior USAR manager declares: "We are in an absolute crisis at the moment in regards to USAR vehicles."
Other emails show officers discussing the 28-year-old USAR truck in Auckland "failing at every second response we put her on", and "playing up again" just five days before the Anniversary Day floods.
For years FENZ has known this.
"The northern truck is unreliable with intermittent starting that continues to be unresolved... Northern and Central USAR teams have 1x truck each that no longer provide the reliability and function expected of an emergency response organisation," a 2020 report said.
FENZ documents reveal the USAR Northern Team's truck has "intermittent starting problems". Two of USAR's three trucks are so old they keep breaking down and pose risks because they lack basic stability control. Photo: Supplied / FENZ
FENZ is now belatedly moving to get three new trucks next year.
The truck issue compounds its problems with a shortage of four-wheel-drive utes for USAR so dire it almost derailed a crucial international training exercise next May at Ardmore, that USAR needs to keep its international accreditation, the papers show.
Crew members were threatening to stop prep work on it.
"The risk is now the site will not be ready," headquarters was warned.
"For a long time now, about as long as this business case has been orbiting the universe, USAR personnel have been wearing out their own cars, trucks, utes, and trailers," USAR's Andy Cardno wrote in July, about the problems at Ardmore, amid the constant task of preparing swathes of training ground with simulations.
"In some cases causing damage. Claiming back for such things is impractical, time consuming and sometimes impossible to calculate.
"This is taking too long."
Cardno, like many others in the email trails, had had enough: "From the 24th July I won't be managing any work at this training facility at Ardmore until we have a dedicated Ardmore ute."
The Northern USAR deputy team leader Jeff Maunder chimed in: "It's just not acceptable that private vehicles for the mainstay of our work around the [international exercise] and numerous operational responses I am aware off [sic] where our people have used their own vehicles."
It took until November this year to bed down a solution with a couple of ring-in utes.
Maunder did not sound impressed. "I think enough business cases have gone forward to expect a permanent solution."
He had warned this needed sorting as soon as possible, anticipating that operational reviews into how the Cyclone Gabrielle response went would highlight the need for permanent USAR utes.
These are far from the only problems FENZ has with getting its people to a disaster. It has ageing and sometimes unreliable large-ladder fire trucks - one could not get to the fatal Loafers Lodge fire in May. Dozens of smaller fire trucks have been sidelined with defects. Its orders for new fire trucks face ongoing delays.
"Changes are all delays these days," its national fleet manager Mike Moran emailed another manager in April, just before it ordered two new transport trucks for USAR, and one for Dunedin brigade, to begin work next May.
Kneejerk assurances about doing the next business case, or chasing up replacement trucks or utes, dot the emails from FENZ bosses.
The stakes are high, with Nelson and Dunedin brigades warning they lack any dedicated transport for heavy rescue, water rescue and salvage equipment, and their business cases: "Delays in being able to respond these types of equipment in a timely fashion, inevitably leads to increased risk to life, losses/damage of property, greater environmental damage and adds to the costs and or complexity of the recovery operations."
They must wait till 2025.
"As we said in our original statement, access to vehicles for specialist crews needs to be balanced with our broader mandate across the country," FENZ said late on Tuesday.
It is not just old trucks, but the lack of trucks that is a problem, forcing teams to hurry to hire them.
"What experience has proven is that when there is a request for a USAR deployment, an unnecessary amount of time needs to be spent in securing vehicles, leading to delays in loading the cache and a delayed response," a report said.
The central team, even with four months' lead time to an exercise, was unable to find a hire truck, and post-Covid the shortage was only getting worse.
Each of the country's three USAR teams insists they need at least one ute, one heavy truck and one medium flatbed truck, to respond properly.
For big jobs like Gabrielle, a full team needs at least three large trucks for gear and up to 70 personnel, and four dogs, the business cases state.
But they show that out of nine vehicles of various types the three teams need, they have had just one vehicle that was fit for purpose - a heavy truck in the south. They have had no flatbed trucks, a single old ute based in Christchurch, and played musical chairs with borrowed utes in the North Island.
In July, the officer so frustrated during Gabrielle, saw yet another business case to get utes permanently for USAR come by, and he helped out with some budget figures: "Costings attached from my previous trip round the universe," Aaron Waterreus emailed.
