Review of CDEM tsunami alerts process

I'm sure by now you've heard the there are two reviews underway following the response to the Samoa earthquake and tsunami. The first of these reviews is an internal review of MCDEM responses. I guess this is similar to the reviews many of us did to double check procedures and arrangements and to implement any opportunities for improvement identified.

The second review has been requested by the Minister. The following information was drawn from the Beehive website:

Civil Defence Minister John Carter has asked for a review into how the Civil Defence and Emergency Management ministry deals with tsunami alerts.

"Generally, the response to yesterday's tsunami warning was pretty good, but there are concerning reports about the ways in which some information was communicated to the public. Frankly, that is not good enough," says Mr Carter.

"Public confidence in Civil Defence is critical. There are always lessons we can learn from events such as these and I am determined to ensure we do learn from them."

Mr Carter says co-ordination between the national Civil Defence headquarters and regional operations went largely to plan, and it is usual for regional civil defence controllers to manage warnings in their own areas, because what works in one area may not work in another.

"For example, some places have cell phone coverage and some don't. That's why it's important regional controllers are able to make their own calls on their own patch.

"However, I think Civil Defence weren't as helpful as they could have been in communicating with the media in the early stages and I am also concerned about reports saying places like Wellington Airport didn't get timely information. We have to sort that out," Mr Carter says.

It was with some surprise yesterday that I learned that the review is complete and that none of the CDEM Groups present at our meeting yesterday had been consulted as part of the review... we'll read the report with interest before making comment.

Catching the next Wave

Yeehaa... HorizonsEM@googlewave.com

HorizonsEM is now on Google Wave Preview. Back in June we talked about a few new things coming up. One of these was Google Wave. We've just received the invitation to participate in the Preview version of Wave (i.e. beta) before the worldwide release. This will give us a chance to take a look at something I personally think will become an important collaboration tool - eventually replacing e-mail as we know it today.

If you're keen you'll want to see this 80 minute video... but you do need to be keen! If you too have a googlewave account - give us a wave... that would be 'shiny'!

Tweeting

You can see from the sidebar that I've been using Twitter a little more. We are starting to get a little bit of a following and I have been a little more conversational in our tweets - I've still tried to keep them semi-official though. I am conscious that the tweets are from the Group and as such can't be too casual.

During Disaster Awareness Week we tweeted our location and closing time. We also tweeted during the tsunami responses and had some members of the team watching Twitterfall on one of the ECC monitors (although not constantly).

Now that I have been upgraded to an iPhone, I can tweet without the need to log on to a computer so it is a lot easier than it was previously.

Remember if your tweeting about civil defence, include the hashtag #nzcd in your message.

Off to the Minister

Well, following the Group Plan Review Committee hearing on Tuesday, the proposed CDEM Group Plan is now off to the Minister of Civil Defence for his comment. The Hon. John Carter gets a month to have a look through the Plan and provide comment. Given that we've worked through MCDEM's feedback and amended that draft I'm hoping for some nice feedback from the Minister.

Once we've received the feedback from the Minister, the Plan will go back to the Joint Standing Committee for final approval (then it will be time for a lemonade).

Busy times...

It's been a while since my last post! We've been relatively busy in the office and the place has been a bit chaotic. The 'house' is undergoing some renovations at the moment and most of the team are trying to avoid the office. Luckily we are all set up to work remotely.

There are a couple of activities to report on... Disaster Awareness Week kicked off for us last Friday in Feilding. This tied in nicely with Farmer's Market and a visit by the Melbourne Cup to the region. Our new AirShelter arrived the day before and the displays were all tested on Thursday afternoon in the backyard of the Council - thank goodness everything went to plan. We were interrupted by a tsunami watch but that didn't hold us back!! We;ve also been in Wanganui, Taumarunui and Palmerston North with the display. The Dannevirke, Levin and Marton displays were postponed due to the weather. We'll catch those punters when the weather fines up.

On the Group Plan front, we received some late feedback from the Ministry that warranted getting the Review Committee together. Up until that point, we had only received submissions from officers and had pretty much agreed to a few minor changes before sending the Plan off to the Minister. The Review Committee gets together next Tuesday to consider the changes and will forward the Plan to the Minister following this meeting. Although there were seven pages of feedback, the general consensus was that the Plan was good to go and MCDEM were just trying to tighten things up a bit.

My view - tsunami response

Well, what a week! There have been quite a few accusations in the media about the NZ response to the earthquake and tsunami from Samoa. I have also been (accurately) reported in regional and national newspapers and there has been some discussion on radio about our ability to respond. I'd like to put the record straight.

The Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management (MCDEM) is NZs official tsunami warning agency. They receive advice from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) in Hawaii. MCDEM then analyses the information from PTWC to determine the impact on NZ coastlines and if appropriate issues a warning to agencies and CDEM Groups as well as the media.

The media is a multi-billion dollar communications industry that emergency managers should be collaborating with when it comes to intelligence gathering. They can get accurate information and images incredibly fast - there is no way we can replicate that (or would even want to). Media obviously receive the PTWC warning and broadcast these without an analysis of potential local impact so can do this in near-real time. I subscribe to the PTWC warnings and also the Global Disaster Alert and Co-ordination System warnings. In this case the first I knew was Paul Henry announcing it on Breakfast TV. The PTWC and GDACS warnings are also linked from the sidebar in this blog.

MCDEM has been clear that there are three levels of warning - natural where you feel the earthquake or see the sea rushing out (or rushing in), unofficial - media, family, friends and official warnings also promulgated via the media and agencies. The public are encouraged to react in an appropriate manner regardless of how they were alerted to the problem.

So what did we do as a Group? EOCs at Tararua and Horizons were activated. Horizons undertook the local response for Horowhenua, Manawatu and Rangitikei without the need to activate local EOCs for the initial response. Police and Fire were present in the Horizons EOC and assisted in decision making and response. SMS messages were sent to agencies via our WebSMS and the public via the Manawatu OPTN system.

Tararua undertook an evacuation of Akitio and Herbertville and a helicopter swept the coastline looking for people on the beach. Horizons had initiated a helicopter sweep of the west coast and ground crews from Fire were deployed to stop people going to the beach. The west coast flight was cancelled before it was completed as the warning cancellation was received from MCDEM.

If that's where it stopped, that would have been an excellent response! Unfortunately there was a fly in the ointment. Some SMS message were delayed in transmission - so here's the guts...

OPTN is a public service that subscribers pay for. We had about 358 people subscribed to the service. This was set up by Manawatu following the 2004 floods and had seen very little use since. Once public complaints started coming in of messages being received hours late and the local media contacted us to find out what was going on, I spoke with the company and advised that this is a level of service we could not support for public notifications.

WebSMS is a service we pay for. The company is based in Melbourne and they handled several hundred messages for us that day. We use this to advise agencies and not the public. There were also some significant delays in this service. Again, I've contacted the company to find out if its a service provider problem - but no. The messages were processed quickly (seconds to a few minutes) through their system to the NZ carriers. The delay unfortunately sits with the telcos in NZ.

I also experienced delays the following day when texting with my family - up to six hours in some cases (I'm sure we've all experienced that).

So what's the main lesson for me??? In future, we will be including the date time in the body of the message that goes out to an agency - this will use up space but will provide a check if a message is late in delivery. It has been our policy for a while now that warnings are passed to agencies verbally and that e-mail, fax and SMS messages are for heads-up and detail.

A full debrief of our response is being undertaken next week and a report will be sent to MCDEM and our Co-ordinating Executive Group.