The latest version of the Dunedin city civil defence emergency management plan includes the establishment of new groups for community assessment and rescue and public safety response. There has also been a change of focus for the plan, to better respond to welfare needs in an emergency.
The changes were more significant than those usually made on regular plan reviews. They were mainly about restructuring the existing operational responses to emergencies and changing the focus of some emergency response groups, Dunedin City Council civil defence and rural fire manager Neil Brown said.
A report on the plan, which was approved by the council's planning and environment committee last week, said initial responses to the Christchurch quakes were generally timely and well managed.
However, as events progressed, frustrations were observed with overly bureaucratic processes being introduced to manage external resources, particularly for rescue work.
To manage things better, the new Dunedin plan included a novel rescue and public safety response group consolidating rescue functions, including those of the police, LandSAR, MarineSAR and NZ Fire Service. The functions of those organisations were previously spread across different response groups.
The new group would also have a public safety focus, including dissemination of warnings, evacuations and hazardous area controls.
Christchurch showed postquake building safety evaluation was a huge undertaking, so responsibility for managing that in a Dunedin emergency had become an engineering response group duty.
Media coverage indicated some affected communities in Christchurch felt unsupported and cut off from information. While that might have been perception only, such concerns needed to be managed.
To address that in Dunedin, a community assessment response group would be set up with community links via community boards, the university and neighbourhood support. The group would be responsible for mobile reconnaissance across the city and surrounding areas.
The quakes had demonstrated the greatest welfare needs were not for somewhere to eat and sleep, but for information and practical assistance, indicating the "traditional" model of large residential welfare centres might not be valid.
The plan for managing a civil emergency in Dunedin now included a new focus for the welfare response group, which would be more flexible and deliver whatever was assessed as being needed at a series of multi-agency one-stop Emergency Assistance Centres at Work and Income offices and/or community facilities.
Those were the most significant changes, he said.
While these changes were made after the experience of several major quakes, the plan was applicable to any event, be it flood, landslip, tsunami or something else.
Mr Brown cautioned that although it was good to have the emergency management plan refined, it would never be "absolutely" right. "We'll always see changes we can make as we learn more."
The plan will go to the full council meeting on December 12 for ratification.
