Ministry praises region’s emergency response planning

The Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management Capability Assessment Report has commended the Manawatu-Wanganui Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) Group’s emergency response.

The report carried out in March 2010 states that: “the Manawatu-Wanganui Group is a model of how CDEM Group members should work together to achieve common goals. The benefits and efficiencies of doing so are evident, in terms of shared resources, peer support among Emergency Management Officers, coordinated planning, and development of transferable skills and training. Given the Group has eight local authorities and a significant geographic area, it is a credit to them that they have been able to develop this sense of cooperation and collaborative working – by no means a given in other CDEM Groups.”

The CDEM Group is based on regional boundaries and combines 8 x councils (Horizons, Ruapehu, Wanganui, Rangitikei, Manawatu, Tararua, Palmerston North, and Horowhenua), emergency services and health boards. It takes a highly coordinated approach to emergency management in the region.

CDEM Joint Committee chairman, Garrick Murfitt said the report is a pleasing reflection of the hard work and dedication of the Group.

“Public safety is paramount and responding to emergencies is a core function of the regional, city and district councils. It’s important that our response capability is robust and this report confirms that we are well on track,” says Mr Murfitt.

The report identifies three areas where improvements could be made: regional welfare coordination, recovery planning and business continuity.

Manager of the Groups Emergency Management Office, Shane Bayley says these areas will form the key focus for the Group over the next year.

Benchmark reached!

It's been a few days since my last posting... a few of the team have been tied up with the National Special Olympics Games being held here in Palmerston North. Last Friday morning however was an important date for the CDEM Group! The Joint Standing Committee met and approved the new CDEM Group Plan. This is the culmination of about 18 months worth of planning and consultation and is the start of the next era of CDEM for our Group.

The Plan will be available on the Horizons web site in the next few days. We will also be publishing hard copies of the Plan for distribution.

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.

Group Plan milestone

The Joint Standing Committee met today and endorsed the draft CDEM Group Plan, we've been working on for the past 18 months, to go out for public consultation. For me this is a great benchmark and I'd like to thank everyone for the help they've provided in getting the Plan to this critical stage.

Next steps include a month for public consultation, followed by a hearing on the 16th October. We then send the proposed Plan down to the Minister for a bit of bedtime reading - he gets a month for that. The Plan then comes back and goes up for final approval on the 4th December.

If you'd like a copy of the draft Plan, you can get that here. We've also provided some guidance on requirements for the submission - there are a few basics we need but didn't want to go to the extreme of providing a form to fill in. You can pick up the submission requirements here.

CDEM Group Plan another step closer

At today's meeting of the Co-ordinating Executive Group, the first draft of the Manawatu-Wanganui CDEM Group Plan 2009-2011 was received and endorsed. There are a couple of minor tweeks to make before the Plan goes up to the Joint Standing Committee on 4th September and then out for public consultation on the 7th September.

The Public Education and Information Strategy was also endorsed by the CEG this morning so all-in-all it has been a pretty successful day.

Group Plan CEG workshop

The Coordinating Executive Group held what I feel was a very successful workshop yesterday to review the first draft of the revised CDEM Group Plan. Roughly half the Plan had been seen by the CEG at previous meetings and workshops however there was still quite a chunk of work to get through.

Brendan Morris facilitated the workshop to give us all an opportunity to focus on the discussions rather than running the workshop. Evan Lloyd also participated in the workshop to provide the background to the hazard and risk analysis prepared by him to support the Plan.

Several hours of good healthy discussion later and there was general agreement that we are making good progress and that the Plan is still on track for approval at the December meeting of the Joint Standing Committee. Before that can happen, there is still quite a bit of work to do and consultation to be undertaken. We'll be working to make the adjustments recommended by the CEG over the next few weeks before it comes back for endorsement as the draft CDEM Group Plan for public consultation.

Anyway... so far, so good.

Head down... on the Group Plan

Well, we are head down on the Group Plan at the moment. We're making a concerted effort to finish the draft of the Plan in time for the next CEG meeting on 16 June. We've opted not to mini-workshop these but draft them out in line with the Director's Guide.

I've just spent some time on the Monitoring and Evaluation chapter and taken the opportunity to have a close look at Jo Horrocks' capability assessment tool. To be honest, the work that has been done by MCDEM on this front looks pretty good. I think we'll find the tool useful for benchmarking where we are at but also identifying how we conpare to the rest of NZ. One of the things that has stood out for me is the desparate need to get a baseline of preparedness data. Quite how we'll do this is not yet determined but I'm working on it.

Evan has made good progress on the risk profile material and that chapter will be the focus over the next few days. Brendan has been working on recovery and that will be our focus in a few weeks.

I'm also looking at the Triennial Business Plan. Given that we don't want to include outputs on the Group Plan this time round, I've been adding the work projects and activities to the Business Plan as we go. I think our challenge will be developing a sense of urgency in achieving some of these outcomes. Perhaps more on this thought later.

CDEM Group Plan update

The review of the CDEM Group Plan is making steady progress. Chapter 4 Readiness and Chapter 5 Response are due to go to the Co-ordinating Executive Group early next week. A copy of these chapters has been placed in the Google Group. There is still some work to do on the roles and responsibilities and the assistance of MCDEM has been sought in this area. We are very aware that other Groups are likely to cut and paste from some parts of our Plan so we better get it right!

Evan Lloyd is working on the Risk Profile chapter and Brendan Morris is working on the Recovery Manual and Recovery Chapter. The draft Communications Strategy is also going to CEG next week but this is still to be refined by the Public Information Managers.

There are a number of supporting documents still to be developed or reviewed, not least of which is the Triennial Business Plan for the Group. Still, we are on track with our project timeline.

Group Plan update

The Joint Committee met last Friday and received and endorsed the first two chapters of the draft CDEM Group Plan (Chapter 1: Background and Chapter 8: Management and Governance). I provided some background for the Committee on the process to date and the sorts of discussions we have been having.

A couple of the key points were:

• Centrally co-ordinated and locally delivered emergency management is key to a consistent approach across the Group,
• A triennial business plan, agreed to and funded collectively by members, will drive the work programmes of the Group,
• We are following a nationally consistent approach to the layout for the revised Plan,
• The CEG and Joint Committee will endorse the entire draft Plan before it goes out for public consultation.

Members were happy with the progress to date and noted the effort that had been put in so far. Some feedback was received about the complexity of the Plan and discussion was had on the possibility of a summarised version being available for people that don't require the full technical and legal version of the Plan. This possibility will be explored with CEG members.

Group Plan... a work in progress

At yesterday's CEG meeting I presented a 'warts and all' version of the Group Plan. This is very much a work in progress but given the nature of the material to date and the fact that it doesn't sit neatly in a single chapter, it was just as easy to give members the whole document. Now this might come back to haunt me but ces't la vie. Clearly we haven't addressed some areas yet and really we've only workshopped our strategic direction and management & governance material. I'm currently working on readiness and response but haven't quite finished these yet (another workshop next week).

The CEG signed off on the Management & Governance chapter and the Background, recognising that we will see the entire Plan again before fully endorsing it before the Joint Standing Committee puts it out for public consultation and Ministerial comment. We may tweek the background a bit but we are confident in the M&G chapter.

If you'd like to have a sneaky peek, here it is.

Good response at response workshop

The fourth of our Group Plan review mini workshops was held this week... response is going to be our focus for a while so it was good to get some of the basics sorted. There won't be any startling changes but there is a move for consistency and best practice. The Co-ordinating Executive Group will be providing greater clarity on expectations and then following through to ensure that we a walking the walk and talking the talk.

After a shorter period of discussion than usual, the participants at the mini workshop recommended that we prepare the readiness, response and recovery chapters of the Plan and then bring them to the CEG for discussion. The basic understanding is in place following the first two workshops and the response discussions at this workshop have given us a good lead for the content of the Plan. Watch this space... things are happening.

Risk profile

I am aware that some of our members have trouble with large attachments to e-mail. I recently sent out a 3Mb file for the risk profile mini workshop and had a few of you contact me to say it had disappeared into cyberspace. To overcome this I've uploaded two documents to the Google Group. The Draft Risk Profile Section and Risk Profile Support Document can be picked up from here. The Strategic part of our current Group Plan can be picked up from here.

The meeting is at Horizons on Thursday 11th at 13:00 and is being facilitated by Brendan Morris from Hamilton.

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...

Checking our direction

The first of the mini workshops for the Group Plan review is to address the strategic direction of the Group. We intend to consider the vision of the Group which should be more than the one-liner provided to us, the issues that may impede that vision, and a review of the issues listed in the current Group Plan. CEG members are invited to participate in this workshop at Horizons Regional Council, 28th July 13:00 - 17:00hrs.

Participants are encouraged to give some thought to the future of the Group. I am willing to post or circulate any prepared material you might have to support this topic, just let me know. Here is the material I have prepared to get the conversation under way. This material in no way reflects the Group's view and is intended as a conversation starter only.

Group Plan mini workshops

At yesterday's meeting of the Co-ordinating Executive Group the revised timeline for the review of the Group Plan was agreed to and the conduct of mini workshops supported. The CEG also recognised this blog as an official, albeit informal, means of communication for the Group.

Members have asked me to publish the dates for the mini workshops in the blog. The idea behind these workshops is for smaller focus groups of the CEG to debate and discuss best practice for the Group and how we go about achieving that through our Group Plan. We would like to maintain a consistent core of 4-5 people across the workshops to avoid going over old ground. Other Group members are welcome to participate in areas that particularly interest them.

The mini workshop dates are:
July 28 - Strategic direction
August 28 - Management & governance
September 11 - Risk profile
October 16 - Readiness & response #1
November 18 - Readiness & response #2
February 25, 2009 - Recovery
April 8 - Monitoring & evaluation
May 14 - Reserve workshop

Emergency Management Officer workshops are also scheduled to either 'operationalise' the discussions of the mini workshops or to inform discussions prior to the workshop. Discussions will also be had during regular EMO meetings. Either way, local EMOs will be fully involved in the redevelopment of our Plan. EMO workshops are scheduled for:
July 29 - Strategic direction
October 16 (pm) - Readiness & response
November 19 - Readiness & response
March 9 - Monitoring & evaluation

Plan review timeline extended

At the Co-ordinating Executive Group meeting last month members asked that we revise the timeline for the CDEM Group Plan. A small working group was formed to undertake this and considered the following requirements:

• Adequate time be provided for discussion by representatives of the CEG
• The no more than one ‘mini-workshop’ be conducted per month
• That the review be based on the sections of the Plan
• That readiness and response be combined for consideration
• That reduction did not warrant a mini-workshop
• That Emergency Management Officers be guided by CEG recommendations to ‘operationalise’ arrangements
• That a focus on response be emphasised in discussions

The CEG will be receiving an item with the draft timeline (Gantt chart attached) on the 24th June and will also be advised that the MCDEM Guideline on Group Planning may not be available until December (reported to the Joint Committee on the 6th June).