A car submerged during the Auckland Anniversary floods in February 2023. Photo: Supplied
Auckland Emergency Management has told the coroner's inquiry into 2023's deadly storms they're better prepared to help displaced people in a natural disaster.
The inquest is looking into the 19 weather-related fatalities from the two storms nationwide, including three men who died in the months following the weather events.
Hearings began in June, and this week continues to scrutinise the emergency response.
Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) general manager Adam Maggs said they had now identified and fortified 132 venues, the majority of which were council owned buildings, to be used as Civil Defence Centres (CDC) should another natural disaster arise.
A CDC is an evacuation centre where people can seek shelter and provisions during a natural disaster.
"We work with Parks and Recreation facilities and we look at all the amenities that are within that facility," he said.
"Depending on the type of hazards, so flooding is one bit, but if we had a tsunami or volcanic event we can now locate the most appropriate venue based on the services and amenities it provides.
"Now, we've got a lot great visibility around flooding risk and the locations of our CDCs."
Maggs said in addition to these potential CDC locations, 10 mobile caches were dispersed around the Auckland region, containing provisions such and food and bedding.
Maggs said these changes had arisen after council faced major challenges on the day of the Auckland Anniversary floods on January 27th 2023.
In particular was AEM's struggle to establish CDCs which were safe locations for evacuees to go during an emergency.
"Coordinating the response on the 27 January 2023 faced a number of significant challenges," he said.
"The Incident Management Team meetings had to be remote as a number of were outside of Auckland and the flooded roads meant asking people to travel to a physical location to coordinate the response could have put them in danger.
"Standing up CDCs on the night was also a very complicated task as many council facilities that would normally be utilised were either unserviceable or could not be accessed due to flooded roads or flooding around the location.
"Along with the response manager and logistics manager on the night, I was helping work with our community facilities team to try and find serviceable CDC locations. We did this until approximately 4am," Maggs said.
He said the reason staff worked until the early hours of the morning was because of difficulties in reaching these locations because of roads flooding.
"It didn't help that the Area Managers couldn't physically get on site, in several cases our response teams did reconnaissance trips in their vehicles and then were later able to identify, look you can't use that facility, it's not safe and we would go back to the drawing board."
Maggs said some newly established CDCs had since been put to use, with AEM opening four CDCs during the response to this month's tsunami warning, providing shelter to people who live on boats.
Auckland Emergency Management has also bolstered its full-time staff, now employing 45 people compared to the 33 of the 2023 storms while more than 500 volunteers have also been brought on.
The Auckland phase of the inquest into the deaths of those who lost their lives during the two devastating and deadly storms of 2023 continues on Thursday.
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