James Thompson, Canterbury Civil Defence Emergency Management Group Controller. Photo: RNZ
Hundreds of civil defence, emergency responders, social services and council staff around the South Island spent much of Thursday stepping through the response to a devastating earthquake.
While the quake wasn't real, the scenario was very much so.
The Emergency Co-ordination Centre, the purpose built command centre in Christchurch's Justice Precinct, could be the safest spot in town in a disaster, according to Canterbury Emergency Management Group Controller James Thompson.
"It's a building that has been designed to continue to function in an earthquake, an earthquake bigger than what the Alpine Fault would throw at us."
It also co-locates emergency responders, such as Police and St John, and has in house catering, who are taking part in the exercise too, practicing their disaster response feeding the hungry responders who will be on site either for the full 12 hours or rotating through two shifts.
Thompson's overseeing a quiet hum as around 60 people from across organisations work together to allocate resources, manage helicopters across the region, check with hospitals, worry about dams created from landslides crashing into rivers, and work together to find people isolated in different parts of the island as a severe weather warning looms.
Exercise Pandora, the inter-regional tabletop exercise, opens on the third day after the Alpine Fault has ruptured, a magnitude 8 quake hitting the South Island.
Thompson says the years of AF8 (Alpine Fault magnitude 8) work - an interdisciplinary collaboration between Emergency Management groups, universities, Centres of Research Excellence and other agencies which has been underway since 2016 - has provided them with an extremely detailed scenario and highly realistic consequences.
He said the exercise assists the responders to "be better prepared and learning."
But in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle, civil defence leaders are stressing the need for people to be self sufficient for longer, "shifting the focus from three days resources to more like seven days."
"Certainly in an Alpine Fault situation, there will be parts of Canterbury that won't get help for six or seven days"
Thompson this will require more community awareness of the need for people to fend for themselves.
The report into the post-Gabrielle response "indicated that we needed to start moving in that direction," he said.
That report which came out of the inquiry into the response to the North Island storms chaired by former Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae, was scathing about aspects of the emergency reponse, finding that in some places the system failed completely, and did not enable people to properly prepare or respond to the disaster around them.
Public warnings and communication were non-existent or insufficient, the capability and capacity of civil defence staff and infrastructure was overestimated or lacking, and there was "a significant mismatch between community expectations about what the emergency management response should offer and what it is able to deliver".
But Thompson suggests the expertise developed in Canterbury - through sheer dint of multiple disasters - would assist.
"We've had the experience of the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes, the Port Hills fire twice now, which has given us, I believe, a different feel for how we respond to these events."
"I'm not going to say if we had a Gabrielle we'd do necessarily a whole lot better, but we'd have a different approach to it, based on the learnings we've already had."
He acknowledged the description from AF8 of a quake of that size "releasing around 350 times more energy than 2011's magnitude 6.3 Christchurch earthquake" could strike terror into the heart of Mainlanders, but says it would feel different, and - in Christchurch at least - would be likely to cause less damage than 2011.
"You've got to remember, that energy difference is spread right across the South Island, rather than very concentrated in Christchurch.
"For example, the shaking we feel in Christchurch might be longer - two or three minutes whereas we only had 20 seconds shaking in the 2011 earthquake, and it's more likely to be a rolling motion than that punch we got.
"There'll still be damage, and there'll still be liquefaction - those things we've seen before we'll see again, but it will feel very different and the damage shouldn't be as significant, especially as Christchurch has a lot of new buildings, better designed buildings and better infrastructure in the ground.
There are likely to be hundreds of aftershocks, right across the South Island, and in the bottom quarter of the North Island, Thompson said.
He anticipated at least two of magnitude seven, and potentially hundreds of magnitude six and beyond.
These posed further risks to life and limb if they caused dams - created by landslides blocking rivers - to flood areas below.
While the exercise doesn't touch on the risk of a potentially catastrophic inland tsunami at Milford Sound, which some modelling suggests could kill thousands,Thompson acknowledged it was a possibility.
There's also a "low chance" an Alpine Fault quake would see large landslides into Lake Tekapo, which is "particularly vulnerable to landsliding", and could provoke inland tsunamis.
Emergency Manager Bronwyn Sutton is Operations Manager for Exercise Pandora.
Sutton started out as a volunteer 17 years ago, attracted by the social opportunities and interesting training jaunts.
But she says it was an early deployment during the Canterbury earthquakes that convinced her it could be her life's work.
"It was the first large deployment I'd done. That was the moment that everything changed from social connection and getting to do fun stuff to realising the skill set i had and the investment that had been made in me made a meaningful difference in the community, and i had the skills to make a difference.
"That piece is so important to me now, and its what keeps me coming to do my job every day."
Sutton was pleased with how the exercise went, and said many of the things that did emerge as challenges had been foreseen in preparations and brainstorming at the onset.
She said the entreaties for people to be ready to survive on their own until Civil Defence arrive obscures the fact that the community itself is part of that response.
"We are all part of a great machine who are going to collectively look after one another. Part of the way we can contribute to that is being prepared."
"Everything we can do as members of the community to be personally prepared allows us to be collectively much more prepared, and can be a meaningful way you can help other people in the community."
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