A new digital disaster coordination system has been brought in by Gisborne district councils, when a national system is nowhere in sight. Photo: Supplied
- Just one person at NEMA is working on short-term fixes to the big gaps in the disaster coordination system
- As fo the existing system, if a disaster strikes next week, only half of the existing system works
- Gisborne has not waited, but built its own system - for hardly any money
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has just one person dedicated to working on a short-term fix of the disaster coordination system that let people down during Cyclone Gabrielle.
NEMA and the country are currently relying on an old system with half its parts working - and it largely failed in the cyclone more than 18 months ago.
Five of the 10 functions do not work, and it offers no effective "situation reporting, action planning and hazard assessments".
Tairāwhiti - driven by four years of storms that were capped by Gabrielle - has not waited, and brought in its own award-winning system.
"For Tairāwhiti ratepayers, it hasn't cost a dollar," said local Civil Defence and Emergency Management group manager Ben Green, who helped set up and run it.
It was already "battled-tested system" when Gabrielle hit - and now was 200-300 percent better on top of that, Green said.
But lessons were not being learned elsewhere, said ex-mayor of Christchurch and ex- Labour Cabinet Minister Lianne Dalziel, demonstrating "our abject failure to learn the lessons of our experiences and the experiences of others".
The existing national system is called Emi. It never had enough technology to do the job, which put councils off using it over the past decade, papers show.
"It is recognised that without renewed and sustained investment that its [Emi's] capacity cannot fully support... incident and response activity," NEMA told RNZ this week.
Emi is becoming less able as it ages, at the same time as the threat it must cope with is getting worse.
Scientists this week advised that Cyclone Gabrielle "must form our new benchmark for preparing for any future natural disaster".
If a disaster did strike next week, the four other functions Emi was meant to do - but can not, according to NEMA reports - are:
- management of resources and logistics
- register people to get help and welfare
- issue alerts to staff
- basic mapping
Among the five it technically can do, at least one - "assigning tasks based on incoming messages" - failed badly during Gabrielle.
Green said the Tairāwhiti system did not have this shortfall
NEMA is no longer trying to upgrade Emi. The government took that approach since Emi began in 2011, tweaking it in 2013, 2016 and 2020 - but it has never been effective, according to several reports released under the Official Information Act.
The main cyclone inquiry report - released in April - said a new system needed to be built.
While NEMA has started work on that, its employs just one full-time person - with some help from a software firm - for "immediate development" of tools to improve monitoring, alerting and reporting decisions in a crisis, the agency said.
A second workstream has three people in it, working part of the time on a business case to find a long-term fix.
The last business case was completed in 2019. It led to an all-of-government effort in 2021 that foundered - unfunded - this year, having built a prototype that was never rolled out.
NEMA told RNZ the government was still currently considering the Gabrielle inquiry recommendations from April.
Ben Green and Gisborne's disaster coordination system. Photo: Supplied
Green has likened operating without data to piloting an aircraft without a windscreen or instruments.
His district council began building its own system four years ago "out of necessity", he said.
"I see this as an interim, given the national ability to develop a comparable system is realistically not going to be a short-term goal."
The system was simple and did not entail buying in expensive off-the-shelf technology and Green said the system had been improved since Gabrielle.
"I'd say it's probably 200-300 percent, even more, functionality in terms of the way we use it in the current version".
The cyclone had trashed technology that provided raw data - such as telemetry systems - so it was important to make that technology tougher, Green said.
The system won two awards in June. Green also picked up interest from other councils at a recent local government conference.
A national system was a bigger issue with many more players, he said.
Green was worried about what councils might do in the meantime.
"The concern I would have in terms of taxpayers and ratepayers, is that people looking for an eminently quick-fix solution, will look to go to try and buy an out-of-the-box system."
He said he was "reasonably confident" a national system would be sorted out, but that councils might make mistakes before that happened.
"We're not forking out tens of thousands of dollars," he said.
Dalziel has called it "madness" to have years of inquiries and reports that "identify the same problems and the same fixes".
"I'm tearing my hair out now," she wrote in a recent column.
Successive governments have consistently made moves and promises around responding better to disasters to save lives and property.
In 2010, $5m was allocated to set up Emi as an all-round solution, but the technology was never capable of that, and this put off local Civil Defence from adopting it.
"The rollout fell short of expectations," said a summary from 2011-12.
"Confidence in the system was further affected by slow progress with resolving system issues."
A year later, after tweaks, it was "still a challenge to improve uptake".
Its use was not made mandatory, so a patchwork system has prevailed until now.
"As the system never received sustained funding and the resource to properly manage its introduction, it resulted in limited adoption and was not further developed to deliver on the intended feature set [of 10 functions]," NEMA told RNZ.
