The ‘well-oiled’ quake response
Civil Defence is much more than flashing lights and tsunami warnings. Nowhere is this more obvious. reports.
The emergency hub in Witherlea, Blenheim, was bursting with shellshocked families, volunteers in hi-vis shirts and trucks with flashing lights on November 14 last year.
That buzz is long gone, a year after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, but Civil Defence staff based at the Emergency
Operations Centre are still flat tack, trying to get the region back to normal.
Civil Defence teams are specially trained in the recovery period; the messy months and years after a disaster.
But Marlborough Civil Defence emergency management officer Gary Spence said the region had a long and complicated job ahead.
‘‘It’s a civil defence job, a council job, and a community job. Once the initial response is finished, people think things are back to normal.’’
Civil Defence was still meeting monthly with the regional recovery group, including representatives from the Marlborough Primary Health Organisation, Marlborough Roads, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and police.
Civil Defence emergency services manager Brian Paton said a large part of recovery was psychological.
‘‘When things like an earthquake happen, people are stressed, they’re drinking alcohol, and there’s more domestic violence. But in Marlborough, the stats for domestic violence haven’t gone up.
‘‘It’s a really macabre measure but it shows that the resources those groups have put into meeting with people in Seddon and Ward and offering free counselling, it’s all working. That reflects extremely well on the NGOs and the PHO, and the earthquake navigators. Those guys have done an enormous amount of work and they deserve a lot of credit for how the community is doing.’’
Alongside welfare, Civil
Defence was still trying to house people whose homes were damaged, Paton said.
‘‘One thing they learnt after Christchurch was that you could put people up in motels while their houses were fixed.
‘‘But this is a largely rural area. You can’t get a farmer to come into town and stay in a motel, they have to stay at the farm to watch their stock. So there’s a lot of planning going on around how to house these people. Some of them are staying in sheds still, which is really not good. We don’t want them to experience another winter like that.’’
Meanwhile, most of the trades involved in house construction and repair had backlogs of work since the quakes.
‘‘It’s a real problem for the recovery process going on. There’s almost no rental properties, and a long waiting list for building houses,’’ Paton said.
‘‘I’ve personally been waiting over a month just to get a quote. For those people who need to get their homes repaired, it’s a bit of a mission. So we’re working with MBIE [the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment] to consider options.’’
In the Hurunui district, where the quake was centred, authorities built temporary villages, which Paton and Spence looked into.
‘‘But trying to manoeuvre a house on a truck up a farm road, it’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, it just doesn’t work,’’ Spence said.
The Marlborough District Council’s building inspectors had not slowed down since the quakes, Paton said.
‘‘Those guys got hammered, during the quakes, they were really under the pump. And it’s still the same, the amount of building going on is crazy.’’
Marlborough Mayor John Leggett said the building control group inspected hundreds of houses in the few weeks after the earthquakes.
‘‘We became the local acting authority for all the small Kaiko¯ura communities this side of the slips for several months. That was just neighbours helping neighbours, really. But it was very demanding.’’
Leggett had been mayor for about five weeks when the quake struck.
‘‘I went straight up to the Emergency Operations Centre [on Wither Rd, in Blenheim,] and they were already in full swing. It was pretty reassuring to see, actually, that there were people already getting control of the thing,’’ Leggett said.
‘‘The community was very keen to reach out to me as mayor and I was really busy those first few weeks.’’
His visit to The Store, at Ke¯kerengu¯, the day after the earthquake was also still a vivid memory, he said.
‘‘Not a breath of wind, a calm blue sea, but the place was absolutely still, with no vehicles, no people. One of our top stores in Marlborough, and you could have heard a pin drop. That was when the enormity hit home, that it was going to be a long recovery period. It was surreal.’’
Spence said caring for those southern communities was ‘‘unbroken ground’’ for Civil Defence.
‘‘We’re familiar with Ward and Seddon, but not the Clarence and Ke¯kerengu¯ area. So we were responsible for a lot more people than we were used to.’’
Paton said Ward and Seddon had volunteer teams that sprung into action, evacuating households
to the town halls and providing supplies.
‘‘We got toilets and showers out there with the defence force, and food and water. All that comes down to the relationships that we’ve got. We’ve got supermarkets that stand up and get extra supplies in to make sandwiches.
‘‘Marlborough is kind of unique for that, we have a lot of handshake relationships. I can ring up Bunnings or New World any time of the day and link them up with the emergency services. We click into action quickly, we’re quite well-oiled.’’
Paton said residents across the region knew to evacuate, which thrilled the Civil Defence team.
‘‘The cool thing was, people went, ‘bugger this, I live in Rarangi, I’m out of here’. Even people living in Redwoodtown headed for the hills ... That’s just
fantastic.’’
Spence said collecting information from teams on the ground was a major challenge.
‘‘People would radio in saying ‘these people need this’. We had so many bits of information coming in so fast, it was a nightmare, from the police and iwi and the Red Cross. We didn’t have a place to put it in a way that everyone could access it.
‘‘And the unfortunate thing that came out of that was people were visited more than they needed to be. People were getting pissed off because they were asked a question they were asked the day before.’’
Paton said Civil Defence had since created a computer database so needs could be logged and ticked off when the need was filled.
‘‘You’re never as prepared as you could be. You can have all the plans in place you want, but you can always be more prepared.
‘‘We had some plans in place that didn’t work for us, but now we’ve put plans in place that will.’’
Leggett said another ongoing challenge was repairing damage caused to infrastructure, which was a priority for the council.
The width and depth of the Opao¯a and Wairau Rivers had changed, and replacing stopbanks was crucial to protect nearby homes, he said.
Innumerable clay pipes, some more than 50-years-old, had cracked and sewerage was seeping into waterways.
‘‘We’ve had to spend a lot of time and resources to understand the extent of damage to our underground infrastructure,’’ Leggett said
‘‘We still don’t know the full extent but now we’re starting to form some opinions.’’
Earthquake repairs cost the council $4.9 million, forming the majority of the budget blow-out for the financial year.
Paton said the sewerage pipes could have been replaced sooner, but the council was already working on some major projects.
‘‘The reality is, we’re a small council and we can only do so much. They’d already been working on the water supply for Havelock, Seddon, Renwick, the sewage in Picton.
‘‘So I guess the question is, do you want potable water you can drink from the tap, or do you want sewage pipes? Because you can’t do it all at the same time. And this little council is doing a heck of a lot better than others.’’
Lessons learnt during the earthquakes, and the aftermath, were already being shared with people across the globe.
Paton would be the master of ceremonies at the International Workshop on Paleoseismology, Active Tectonics and Archeoseismology at the Marlborough Convention Centre on Tuesday night. Experts would share information about the Kaiko¯ura earthquakes, and discuss the Alpine Fault, which had a 30 per cent chance of rupturing in the next 50 years.
Spence said the best way to get Marlburians prepared for the next big quake was educating school children. He helped run the Clued Up Kids programme which taught children how to shelter during a quake and what to put in an evacuation kit.
‘‘It’s our flagship education programme for schools. And it works so well, because they put pressure on their parents to have an evacuation plan and kits.’’
But Paton said the trick was trying not to ‘‘scare the crap out of people’’.
‘‘We just say, ‘here’s the facts, here’s the likelihood, be prepared’.’’