A failure to communicate
could see the Domain cricket fields filling up with water.”
Shortly after this, Simpson rang the mayor’s office to get a gauge of how the rain situation was being handled.
“Actually it was Max [Hardy] . . . he said, ‘Oh, look, I’ve got to go, the mayor’s come in’ and I thought great because if it’s trouble, he’s around. It was about four . . . And the rest, as they say, is history.”
THE MAYOR’S office says staff were waiting on advice from the authorities from shortly after 4pm.
Whether through indecision or a sense of restraint to avoid being an added burden, they were not demanding urgent updates. But as the crucial hours after 5pm ticked by, the group on the 27th floor office realised Auckland Emergency Management and Fenz did not have a handle on the situation.
Hardy says the “key request” of the mayor from AEM was simply to remain available to be briefed about the situation at 6.15pm and 8.30pm.
“So we did want to seek the information through what we thought would be the official channels rather than act on anecdotal information that we were receiving. But he [Brown] was keeping in touch with various councillors and about what was happening.“
In fact, frantic communications between the emergency service agencies were already occurring — which often excluded council executives entirely.
It is striking how early in the day they were canvassing a possible state of emergency across the region.
At just 5.10pm, both Fenz and police were corresponding with an AEM controller about the “threshold for declaration of emergency”. The controller responded that “it’s an evolving situation”.
AEM general manager Paul Amaral said in those same exchanges “declaration something we should consider, as doesn’t seem to be getting better, potential loss of life and need to evacuate”.
With a sigh, Hardy gets to the crux of the error in communication in and out of the mayor’s office that night — as they saw it.
“The mayor’s bias was to trust the experts. This comes through quite heavily in the press conference he gave [the next morning] which is: ‘I’ve relied on the experts and tried not to get in their way, right’.
“So they are clearly struggling with getting on top of the scenario. They didn’t need us sort of shouting at them and asking every five minutes for more information.”
The mayor is less delicate around the performance of AEM staff on the night. “Occasionally, they’d ring and say, they’re thinking about [declaring] an emergency but they haven’t made a decision yet. They’re going to have a meeting at 8.30pm. So we waited around. Then they said, no we’re not going to do it yet. And so I just do what I was told to do, mate.”
While the mayor was independently capable of taking the initiative to declare a region-wide state of emergency, it’s clear that personal authority was not foremost in his mind.
“I assumed the people who had been working in this for months, preparing, would know what they were doing,” Brown said.
“I was quite surprised to find that the reason they delayed was because the first three emergency places [hubs] they set up flooded. They didn’t tell me that until later.
“So I’m thinking: ‘I don’t have much confidence in these people’. But that’s their job. There you go.”
At 5.45pm AEM posted on
Facebook that it would “stay in touch” regarding the evolving weather situation. This post received 340 comments, but there was no further response by AEM until 10.01pm that evening.
AUCKLAND CENTRAL Green MP Chloe Swarbrick was also becoming increasingly frustrated at the information void.
That Friday she had just exited a stint of Covid isolation and was visiting her younger sister and her babies in Balmoral during the afternoon.
Like the mayor’s apartment, Swarbrick’s electoral office was on K Rd, at the elevated southern edge of Auckland’s CBD.
“Things were getting pretty full on. Dominion Rd had not looked good as well, but it still wasn’t very clear . . . what we were facing except for just a lot of rain.”
Once back in her office, Swarbrick hit the phones.
Although her exact call logs from the night are long gone, the first text she sent to Brown was from 6.30pm.
“I texted him asking about ‘a contact for CDM’ which would have been civil defence emergency management, and he said that he was in briefings then,” Swarbrick said.
“Then tried my luck with the frontline firefighters . . . I got the intel from them about the fact that they had for hours been at full capacity and that was when I realised just how full noise it was.”
“[The information] kind of wasn’t quite getting out and then I’m a third party sitting outside of that.”
One example of this communication blockage was NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi’s decision to stop live Twitter and online updates just after 8pm.
Waka Kotahi has already revealed that a team leader came back from annual leave to resume online updates after Minister of Transport Michael Wood said at 9.01pm that night he had “instructed the agency to re-open their channels urgently”.
Documents obtained under Official Information reveal there was only one Waka Kotahi social media operator on that evening, whose shift lasted from 10.30am to 7.50pm.
Meanwhile, Swarbrick’s attempts to get information out of the mayor, the executive of Auckland Emergency Management and “a range of top dogs” at Fenz were hitting a wall.
“That’s when I was, like, all right, chucked on my raincoat and my boots and I went down to the Fenz building. The people who I had been calling were basically like ‘whoa, whoa, whoa [you’re not coming in]’. I was like, again, I’m not here to be difficult, I just need clear information. I’ve sat on the sidelines in many of these kinds of environments. Then I was kind of turned away.”
It was now about 8pm. Swarbrick had approached the Fenz command centre located behind the Pitt St CBD fire station. Inside were representatives from AEM, Civil Defence and Fenz top brass.
“I was really perplexed about what seemed like the disconnect, whereas on the front lines, talking to the firefighters, they were slammed,” Swarbrick says.
“And then you walk into the Fenz building and everyone’s just kind of like … I get that it’s not just sitting around, but it kind of looks like sitting around, and some [kind of ] holding message can be delivered to [the public] in that time.”
Swarbrick’s account of the dislocation of frontline firefighters from the Fenz management was no distortion of reality.
A Fenz press release at 5.07pm that night said “every fire truck in Auckland is responding to the priority calls”. This directly contradicted the statements of the top official that night, Auckland regional manager Ron Devlin, who the day after the downpour — in a January 28 press conference — indicated the situation was under control early that Friday afternoon.
Devlin said they didn’t recommend declaring a state of emergency at 6pm because it “didn’t feel at that time it was needed”.
Yet, one senior Auckland firefighter who started his shift at 6pm on January 27 said by the time he got in his truck they were only responding to life-threatening jobs.
“A lot of the guys were up to their chests getting to it. You know, we’d get called to an address and most of the time we couldn’t get to that address.”
UP IN the mayor’s office, there was a point that Auckland Council director of governance Phil Wilson realised this night was different from a typical Auckland flood.
The city floods almost annually in the low-lying West Auckland region around Massey, where there is a collection of questionably situated new housing developments.
But this time the geographical breadth of the different emergency reports they were receiving alarmed Wilson.
“Because more often than not, we have quite localised things. [This time] you could look out the window and it was still early enough for us to expect a summer evening, but it was quite dark and it was still p***ing down.”
“So (I was) starting to think, ‘oh s***’. And it’s probably a fairly accurate ‘oh s***’.
Wilson says he thinks this impression came around 6.30pm.
By this time, Fenz has registered
500 calls for help. Things escalate from then on.
At 6.15pm, the mayor says he received his first briefing from AEM and was “advised that emergency services were coping and didn’t need a declaration of emergency. Fire and Emergency supported this advice at the time. AEM did not get in touch again for another three hours.”
At 7pm the Elton John concert is officially cancelled, but most of the
40,000 ticket holders are already in the open-air grounds of Mt Smart Stadium.
The mayor complains “it should have been closed earlier” to Auckland Councillor Sharon Stewart, the Emergency Management Committee chair.
One Herald journalist dropped off at Mt Smart for the concert recalls how she was nervous having her
1-year-old in the car. She could barely see out the windscreen.
“We had to take our sneakers off to wade through knee-deep, newlyformed lakes. It was freezing, people were in wetsuits. I remember thinking, ‘surely the concert will be cancelled’ but I kept checking online for updates and there was no sign of it.”
After the event was cancelled minutes later, the journalist says she was lucky to catch an Uber as thousands lined up for buses unable to reach the stadium stops due to road closures.
“We couldn’t get out of Onehunga, let alone on the motorway to get back out to West Auckland. Every road we tried, we ran into water — the car would have been fully submerged had we kept going. We were driving around for about two hours and I felt sorry for the driver.”
At 7.30pm, a body is found in the suburb of Wairau Valley on the North Shore — the first of four deaths.
Just a few minutes later, a landslide on Shore Rd, Remuera, leaves one person missing.
This turned out to be the Dave Lennard — a respected mechanical expert and long-time volunteer at the city’s Museum of Transport and Technology (Motat), the second person to die in the floods.
Lennard’s son is also in the house at the time of the slip, and manages to escape despite being initially trapped by one of his legs.
By 8pm, the Northern Motorway and the Waterview Tunnel in the inner west have flooded. Footage emerges online of half-submerged buses still carrying passengers.
By 8.35pm Fenz has received more than 1000 calls for help. Shortly afterwards, a MetService briefing predicts further torrential rain over the next two to three hours up to
120mm, with localised downpours of high intensity.
Evacuations are now in full swing. People are being housed at Waitākere Fire Station and Henderson Police Station.
Surf lifeguards rescue 69 people from the North Shore using inflatable boats. Fifty people have been evacuated from rest homes. Fortythree people are trapped in Kumeū .
At 8.37pm, Auckland Airport is closed to all flights, with people trapped in the international terminal and the car park flooded.
At 8.50pm police advise there is another unverified fatality.
At 8.55pm, the controller of the AEM hub advises he alerted the mayor “a couple of hours ago” regarding a state of emergency declaration and will “call him straight away to set this in motion. And that’s what my recommendation will be”.
At 9.15pm, Auckland Councillor Josephine Bartley emails all the council governing body, including the mayor and Hardy.
“Dear Max and Mayor, declare a state of emergency now. I’m getting families from Māngere area asking me what to do because their homes are flooded. . . They’re sitting ducks. Where are the evacuation sites to let people know where to go?”
North Shore Councillor Richard Hills responds: “The floods and slips are something I’ve never seen before, and we cannot update our communities through official channels because the official Auckland CDEM channel’s last update posts were more than three hours ago.”
At 9.25pm the declaration is brought to the mayor and it is signed at 9.27pm, marked by a time-stamped photo taken by Wilson — who also facilitated the AEM staff to enter the Albert St building and run the mayor through the official signing process.
Between the point of crisis identified by Wilson shortly after
6pm, and the eventual declaration of emergency at 9.27pm, there was a kind of waiting game in the mayor’s office that has since been criticised.
Just like Hardy, Wilson says the Albert St building was “quiet” and empty of staff.
“To be really clear, I didn’t have an operational role in terms of emergency management,” Wilson says.
“But the people who did were working remotely and accessible.”
Wilson, who is now the Auckland Council chief executive, says he felt the rapid report into all aspects of the emergency response, delivered by former police commissioner Mike Bush, vindicated the mayor somewhat against the accusation he lacked leadership.
“We, organisationally, didn’t serve him as well as we might have,” Wilson says of the council.
But the chief executive concedes Brown could have spoken publicly earlier than he did.
“Could he [Brown] have been more demanding [of information out of AEM], pressure us? Possibly,
“You know, I mean I can’t speak for the mayor but, when you’re used to kind of managing things, you’re inclined to jump in.
“But that’s not the way that emergency management works. It’s got to necessarily be disciplined.”
At the time, what we failed to appreciate was the importance of declaration [of an emergency] in communicating the severity to the community.
Phil Wilson, Auckland Council head of governance
THE STAFF at the AEM city control centre only met the mayor in person later that night, arriving at the council’s Albert St headquarters for an 11.14pm media briefing.
In his opening lines, the mayor said that “thousands of Auckland emergency workers are putting themselves at risk across the region tonight.
“This is going to be a horrible night.”
Brown identified that “in particular” the declaration enabled emergency workers to carry out and enforce evacuation procedures for the public.
He said he made the declaration “immediately” after getting the advice to do so from the AEM duty controller.
“It would not have been appropriate for me to act before that point,” Brown says.
The mayor swiped his key card to leave the Albert St offices at 12.33am that morning.
At 12.38am that night a second body was found in Wairau Valley.
Reflecting on the errors of the night, and what has changed in the subsequent 12 months, Wilson singles out the procedural hurdles required for the mayor to declare an emergency.
“I was party to some fairly intense conversations about the declaration process.
“The decision to declare an emergency — something that had never happened in Auckland’s history by the way — there’s a technical basis to it. It’s supposed to be used when emergency services advise us that they can no longer cope.
“And I think at the time, what we failed to appreciate was the importance of declaration for the purposes of communicating the severity of this to the community and its symbolic value.
“We would handle it differently now and have different operating procedures for that as a direct consequence of that, and the advice to the mayor would be different.”
Brown, for his part, is less magnanimous about the scrutiny that came on him in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
“Then you lot [the media] behaved like fools the next day. No, it wasn’t [reasonable scrutiny], it was stupid. You’ve [the media] got to accept some level of responsibility.”
Months on, he steadfastly rejected the suggestion his communication style on the night, or in the days following, lacked a human touch.
“I’m an engineer. Ask me engineering questions. Not how I feel. It’s bulls **** .
“Between the time Auckland Council emergency managers stood up an incident team at 4.30pm and the first briefing I received at 6.15pm, the damage had been done. It was a monumental system failure and no one individual is at fault. This is something that was completely lost on media in the plethora of disaster reporting.
“Let’s hope we all learn to do better next time, me included.”
Wilson asks for realistic expectations from the public regarding future emergency responses.
“I can honestly say that were something similar to happen again, I think we’re a lot better prepared. My worry . . . I think people have to appreciate, the very unusual and severe nature of this event. If we had
. . . 250-300ml of rain in a short period of time in the region on that scale, again, I don’t think anyone should pretend that there won’t be impacts.
“It’s just that, by God, we’ll be better at managing it.”