COVID: the never-ending story | |
Hi, Drew here, working from home as we still surf the ever-changing waves of COVID during the new hybrid activation/BAU (Business As Unusual). The picture is my home studio desk, and current view as I write to you this morning. Sorry for the delay in getting this to you, but the activation changed things again.
We had planned to share some of the Sarb Johal presentation with you, but that was cancelled due to the COVID Waikato situation. It was to have been a hands-on workshop for those of us who have to sustain activation while also figuring out how to take care of ourselves mentally, emotionally, physically and more. I had arranged to record some of the shareable parts for you. I still hope to do that when we can re-schedule with Dr Johal.
In this edition, I'll introduce you to our new team members, give you an update on our regional hazards portal, take you behind-the-scenes at our end over this last few weeks and project a little into the future.
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We have three new full-time team members in our Group Emergency Management Office.
Marc and Sia started with us during the previous activations in August and September. The day after Labour weekend, Aaron Tregoweth, our new Team Leader of Operations joined mid latest activation.
Normally we have inductions, training and then if they're ready to go, we may have an activation. But for each of these three, it was in the door and straight into a coordination centre briefing and function assignment "Hi! We'll introduce you to your normal job another day, but right now you're deployed and in the Welfare/Ops/Logs team. Welcome!"
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Marc is going to be doing a lot of the work developing the training programmes with Andy, so as you can imagine, after his welcome, Marc has a newfound passion for developing next level onboarding training. :)
Marc's background in Emergency Management is with Red Cross.
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Sia's background is with the Ministry of Social Development and community engagement. Sia is also a mother of three, is a natural fit for welfare and has been working closely on the heavy Welfare response with Irving Young (our Group Welfare Manager) since she started.
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Aaron Tregoweth (Trigger) | |
Te Kuiti boy Aaron has been in the Military for the last 200 years give or take, is also a Chef, and after numerous international deployments (such as Afghanistan and areas hit by natural disasters) and being a father to three daughters, he developed a deepening interest in emergency management.
Aaron recently finished his post grad dip so now qualifies to be on official BBQ duty (we needed a chef with BBQ skills) when we open the office again. If you visit us, call Eva and find out which Friday is BBQ day and then come in at lunchtime. That's a pro tip from Trevor Ecclestone, our Waikato DHB liaison. He's refined that to an art form.
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Our Regional Hazards Portal has just been updated by Rick Liefting's Waikato Regional Council's Regional Resilience Team, including Derek Phyn on GIS and Sophie Marsh on project-managing all the people, requirements and agreements.
Our aim is to have a single portal with all publicly available information for your community. If you're buying a house, maybe you'd like to check if the prospective property is in a flood zone. Or if you're looking at a piece of coastal property, check out the past shoreline data, and see if the land that looks solid now is really just a sand bank that has built up over the last 50 years and can just as easily wash away in the opposite cycle.
Or maybe you want to see if your parents are living in an area susceptible to tsunami so you can help them plan an evacuation route on various trigger thresholds. These are examples of the reasons our CDEM Group Plan tasked the regional council to develop this portal.
There are a couple of updates more easily visible: two new tabs: one new tab dedicated to Emergency management and another for District Council data. This enables us to now move forward with getting more local information into the previously regionally weighted portal version 1.0.
Some information is presented twice because we're trying to make it easier for people to go to their primary subject of interest and find related information. For instance, you can see tsunami information under Coastal Hazards and Emergency Management.
It's still early days but our 2.0 update brings us closer to the next step of bringing as much of the publicly available local data into the portal.
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WHAT WE'VE BEEN DOING
Some parts of Waikato were plunged back into Alert Level 3 from 11:59pm Sunday 3 October. From Monday morning we activated the Group Coordination Centre with staff working remotely.
The DHB was the lead agency and we supported primarily with Welfare, Pouaarihi and Intel functions, with additional support from Public Information Management.
Locally, councils supplied staff resources to help the logistical and facility arrangements for CBACs, catering for a spike in demand for COVID testing.
Soon, vaccination centres became another focus, and as of this week, vaccination centres are everywhere across the Waikato.
Another focus in the Intel team (a team of one this time, thanks to all the work done by the previous teams setting up the dashboards and GIS systems) was to forecast the likelihood of different parts of the emergency management system being required to activate at higher levels.
We focused on the flow of financial and food resources, looking for any signs a community was needing help to open up the systems. Key to this work was the exceptional quality of relationships between the agencies. Building on the work our welfare network has been doing with social service agencies, we have reached a point where these relationships have enabled an entirely new model of working. The Public Health Unit, Ministry of Social Development and the other agencies are preparing to transition to the new model over the next week.
WHAT MIGHT THIS MEAN FOR YOU?
In the new model, social services organisations and agency staff are going to take more of the COVID load.
This may mean that individuals normally called in when an emergency event requires coordination may not be available.
As we navigate this changing environment, you may be the first call if we have a concurrent event like a cyclone, earthquake, tsunami or flood (such as Gisborne just experienced). So watch this changing space closely. We'll keep you updated as New Zealand's emergency management system changes or starts to morph into something new.
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It has been a ghost town in the training rooms.
Most of the training was cancelled over the last month, again because of the COVID situation in the upper Waikato.
However, Andy has used that to our advantage by arranging for the magnetic white boards to be repainted with a smooth surface while no-one was needing to use the rooms and inhale paint fumes.
The whiteboard walls will be ready to use from Monday 8 November, after having a couple of weeks of alone time. The painters also took away our whiteboard markers and said they'd bring them back when they can train us how to use them. I'm personally looking forward to seeing how we'll be trained on which end of the markers to point at the big white bits. (Who said we can't use sarcasm in a professional newsletter? Pfft. There are worse coping mechanisms in this COVID landscape.)
Between now and our next newsletter, we may move back into Level 2 and be able to run training again. You can check anytime to see if new training is back on. Go to https://takatu.civildefence.govt.nz/, sign in, click on the Courses tab, click the function, go to the course, and scroll down to the blue links under the heading Online Activities.
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We've been planning some changes since 2019 (when we prepared some business cases that have now become reality). Some of the things we knew we needed to do required convincing some of our communities to consider learning to use tools like Teams and Zoom. Then COVID happened and now that's not an issue any more. (Although the issue of speaking while muted will probably be with us as long as COVID.)
So, in the next year, you will see some very cool updates from us and we hope you enjoy them.
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