A central place to find information on roads, transport, closures, forecasts and other vital messages during a weather event could be some time away for Otago residents.
Otago civil defence managers say getting information to the public is the responsibility of the relevant agencies, and it will not step in to co-ordinate information unless the situation becomes a declared civil defence emergency.
Other South Island regional emergency management structures sent out regular information to the public through releases to the media, social media, and websites during the snow storms of the past few days.
But Otago's regional emergency management body, the Otago Civil Defence Emergency Management Group, issued nothing.
Asked why such information was not made available through a central emergency response agency, group controller Wayne Scott said to do that would simply be regurgitation.
Each relevant agency was responsible for getting its own information out to the public, and, at this stage, the group was happy that was being done in a satisfactory manner.
The group would only activate its emergency communication system through radio networks in the case of declared civil defence emergency.
Otago's emergency management system was fundamentally different from Southland's, which had moved all local authority emergency response managers into one team under one roof in Invercargill.
That made it easier for them to release information from a central point, as they had during this week's snow storm.
Local authorities in Otago each had an emergency manager, who worked independently. Otago was not likely to run a single-layer emergency management system like Southland's, as it had more local authorities with bigger populations in geographically diverse areas, and each local authority worked its own emergency response system.
Dunedin City Council civil defence manager Neil Brown said this week's snow was no different from any other disruptive event which happened periodically in the city, and the dissemination of information in such an event was the responsibility of the various relevant agencies, not civil defence.
Southland changed from a system like Otago's to the single-layer system 18 months ago following concerns, including from the emergency services, about the lack of a "unified voice" during emergencies under the old system, Emergency Management Southland manager Neil Cruickshank said.
