Incident Control Point

At last our new PRFO wagon has been fitted with the cargo tray I talked about in my earlier post. The tray is designed to carry incident management equipment in a way that still makes everything easily accessible. The company we used Vehicle Smart Draws took our basic idea and turned it into reality. The tray has a pull out bench with fold out sides to create a larger work table.

Underneath this table are a couple of drawers for the smaller equipment we'll need such as ID vests, office supplies, lighting etc. Behind this space there is also additional storage space under a cubby. A large inverter provides us with power to the work table anough to run our laptops, printer and that flash new coffee machine Ross has his eye on (yeah right). A feed for the radios from the cab is also provided to the work table and the remote heads can be positioned at the rear of the vehicle.

This unit coupled with our mobile office equipment and a canopy to keep the sun off will provide an excellent platform to perform ICP activities and briefings. All the fire fighting equipment is deployed on other vehicles or trailers.

Boys on tour

As part of our introduction to Rangitikei and Manawatu the Horizons and PNCC emergency management teams did a tour of the districts with a few experts in tow to give us the low-down on some of the highlights...

First stop, the Reid Line Makino River spillway. Rob and Cliff (Horizons Ops staff in orange) provided us with an overview of the works and some of the activities being undertaken in the next construction season. It was pretty boggy and still raining, but the team was interested in learning about this project. One quick lesson was to stay on the hard!

Malcolm (Environmental Management) and Jeff (Catchment Data and Information) helped us on the rest of the tour by providing overviews of the sandy hill country erosion, sustainable land use initiative, Utiku and Taihape landslide issues, Rangitikei at Mangaweka monitoring site and Dam 100 in the upper Hunterville flood detention scheme. General discussions about historical events and issues in the districts also helped as we moved from site to site.

Evan did a great job organising this so thanks to Evan and the staff that helped us out. Also to PNCC for the use of their van... great day guys.

BGAN gets closer

BAIKONUR COSMODROME, Kazakhstan – A Proton Breeze M launch vehicle successfully lifted the Inmarsat-4 F3 satellite into orbit on 19 August, marking the third mission of the year for International Launch Services (ILS). This brings the introduction of the Inmarsat Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) closer to reality for New Zealand and the Pacific.

Many readers will be aware that broadband satellite coverage is currently pretty limited in the Pacific region. Several agencies in New Zealand have purchased the hardware in anticipation of BGAN services becoming available. We have left space in our mobile office for the BGAN unit but will only purchase the equipment once the service is available. This launch, which was delayed following issues with the launch vehicle earlier this year, is really exciting for emergency management in isolated or challenging communications environments.

I'll keep you posted on our purchase programme and the tests that we undertake with partner agencies with this capability. If you're really keen, you might like to watch the launch webcast here.

Management & Governance

It has been a few days since my last post but we have been busy putting together the discussion material for the next mini workshop on the review of the CDEM Group Plan. I have e-mailed this information to the CEG representatives along with an early draft of the Director's Guide on CDEM Group Plan Review. I'm not at liberty to share the draft Guide with you but have posted three things that may be of interest:

• the memorandum outlining a discussion on delivery models, some funding models, and a commentary (M-Management-Governance-sb.doc)
  
• the first draft of Chapter 8 Management and Governance - this is missing some parts until we have had our workshops (CDEM Group Plan Ch 8-190808)
  
• the post strategy workshop discussion notes (M-strategic-direction-post-workshop300708-sb)
  

Click here to go to the files...

When the siren goes... worth a listen

Radio New Zealand have been playing a series of broadcasts related to civil defence emergency management and natural hazards. I must confess it took me until the last episode to listen to one of these but it was actually quite good! The stories are entitled 'When the siren goes' and are divided into six episodes. Jerome Cvitanovich is the host who takes us through a series of hazards and interviews New Zealand's leading experts on hazard and emergency management as well as witnesses and survivors.

Episode 1 is an overview of hazards
Episode 2 is on earthquakes
Episode 3 is on volcanoes
Episode 4 is on tsunami
Episode 5 is on snow storms
Episode 6 is on floods

I encourage you to have a listen to this series. For those of you who like a little more action and pictures... check out this tornado video on You Tube.

More weather on the way?

Well... it is that time of year you know! There is quite a bit of interest in the media at the moment about the next storm front on the way. We've been keeping an eye on it and while a picnic at the beach is probably not your first option, we don't expect this event to cause too many problems for our region. We will of course be keeping an eye on things as it gets closer and our duty officer system is always operational.

At the moment there are wind and snow warnings out for parts of the country and weather watches for rain but these haven't yet reached warning criteria. The ground is saturated from past events but river levels have dropped so there is capacity within the system to take some rain.

I think a warm fire and the Olypmic games are on the cards for the weekend.

My view - road closure info standards

Recent events have again highlighted the need for multiple roading authorities across the Group to collaborate on a system for integrated road status information - not just to emergency services but to the travelling public. A recent service offerd by the Police goes some way to solving this...

Get live updates direct from Police Communication Centres in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Updates include information on major events and incidents, road crashes, closures and conditions. You can sign up to receive updates from just one area or from all over the country.

The New Zealand Transport Agency (formerly Transit New Zealand) also provides information about State Highway status.

As a road user what I would really like is to view a map that clearly represents where roads are open, marginal or closed with an indication of delays or time to reinstate. During the recent storm event all roads in Horowhenua could have been considered marginal. I'd like to plan my route by zooming in and out of the map to look at detour options.

As an emergency manager I'd like this level of road information to be available within our GIS so that I might compare it with other information, such as flood plains, evacuated areas, welfare centres, emergency service locations etc. As a decision tool, knowledge of road status is essential. The current manual processes slow down the integration of this information and with the cooperation of roading authorities can be accelerated.

At upcoming Lifelines Advisory Group meetings I would like to address standards that can be adopted to facilitate information exchange and display. I'm sure many will agree that it is an area we can improve upon.

A weekend of celebration

There were a couple of celebrations held over the weekend that are worth recognising. Firstly, the EMANZ graduation was held at the Conference Centre. Graduands from all over New Zealand attended and were recognised for achieveing the level 2 and level 4 certificates. Tom Roche is pictured as emcee for the afternoon and was also the recipient of the Chief Executive's Award for Excellence. Congratulations to all involved in the training and the celebration.

On Saturday evening, Mitchell Brown celebrated his Gold Star Award. Mitch has completed 25 years with the New Zealand Fire Service and has clearly developed an extensive network of friends and colleagues during this time. Mitch's friends and family celebrated the award at the Bunnythorpe Fire Station with both national and international colleagues. Mitch is a dedicated member of the Co-ordinating Executive Group and has a real passion for emergency management. Good on you Mitch!

Tsunami data has arrived

I'm happy to report that we have received data from GNS Science on our tsunami run-up modelling. I've handed this over to our GIS team to produce a map of one area to show the CEG on Tuesday. Following this, we can develop material to suit our needs including plan development as well as public awareness and education initiatives. I will circulate the report and raw GIS data to the EMOs and Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management as well.

The data will also reside in our GIS system as a layer of hazard information. As we grow the GIS for emergency management purposes, we will be able to activate the various hazard layers to compare with infrastructure, community developments and emergency responses.

New PRFO wagon

Well the replacement vehicle for Ross Fothergill is just about operational. Ross is the Principal Rural Fire Officer for Manawatu and Rangitikei Districts and is employed by Horizons Regional Council to undertake this work. The vehicle is a Nissan Navara double cab and has been equipped with fire radio, regional council radio, CDEM radio, cellphone, GPS navigation, 240V inverter, slim light bar, and work lights and a 12V supply in the canopy. A cargo tray is yet to be fitted but its on the way. This will hold the equipment required to initiate a response and provide a work platform for incident control.

The canopy/cargo area is being set up to enable the use of the mobile office in the field. The wireless networked laptops and printer will all be able to operate from the vehicle. The use of the vehicle as the Incident Control Point is the primary driver for this configuration.

We haven't gone for the whole lights and sirens approach as we believe this is a management vehicle. The light bar is a health and safety consideration for incidents on the road. Over the coming months and years the staff of the Emergency Management Office will be increasing their skills to provide support to the PRFO.

Fire bugs de-light

Well the annual FRFANZ (Forest & Rural Fires Association of New Zealand) and IFE (Institute of Fire Engineers) conferences have been combined this year and have come to balmy Palmy. The two day conference (followed by field trips) has a fairly chocka programme with speakers from Greece, the United States of America, the United Kingdon and Australia, as well as many from New Zealand.

Excellent support from trade providers and agencies wanting to share information means that the foyer is full of cool stuff!!! I'm glad I left the order book in the office. Here is Noel being tempted by the goodies.

A little bit of R&D

You know things are serious when the techo's have the help files open!! Gareth is shown here working on a new technique for getting images from our cameras to the office. Apparently no-one else has done this with the GPRS technology we are using, so we are breaking new ground here. The camera (looks like robot eyes looking up) and the blue GPRS transmitter are being introduced to each other... hopefully they will work well together.

Gareth Gray is responsible for establishing some new webcams for us. We have purchased a few cameras for deployment to Akitio and Wanganui. These will help us get a better understanding of the impacts of wave and storm surge events that MetService and MetOcean provide us information on. We will also be using our survey team to gather information about actual run-ups following significant events.

We also have a third camera and are still tossing up whether this should go to the Moutoa Flood Gates or back to the Tangiwai site where we captured images from the 2007 Ruapehu lahar event.

Here is a link to the camera site... we have bought the M12 day and night cameras.