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.