Categoría 2: fisioterapia

Co-ordination in a multi-agency response is vital, due to the number of agencies and

organisations involved in responding. It is imperative that co-ordination is seen as an essential element during the response and the extent of the co-ordination can have significant impacts on the quality of the response. The difficulty in co-ordination increases with the scale of the event as the greater the geographical area, the more people are involved, and often the greater the damage (Curnin, Owen, Paton & Brooks, 2015).

Co-ordination of a disaster can improve efficiency and quality of the response by allowing communication, management of resources, and information sharing between different agencies (Coppola, 2015). The response to the Kaikoura landslide dams required high levels of co-ordination as the damage was widespread and the response involved many agencies working together.

Due to the number of landslide dams, the response was dynamic and constantly changing by the day or hour. This made co-ordinating the response challenging as plans constantly changed and the responders needed to remain flexible throughout.

Interviewee C:

“Flexible, yeah you have to be very flexible and a lot of people don’t like that flexibility. It has to be dynamic in every way. On one day you can’t get into the most critical ones because there is low cloud where the other one you could so there are lots of different variations.”

The situation had to be constantly reassessed before making plans or decisions on what to do next. Decisions on the next steps were based around what was seen in the field the day before.

Interviewee F:

“Yes you can plan to an extent but you have to remain a bit flexible. It’s a bit of a trap to think you can plan too much because there is always peculiarities in events.” “We had received some information but then we know they are up there now gathering more data and it is out of date before you can actually do something with

it.”

The hazard being dealt with was constantly changing and therefore the response to it needed to keep up. Changes in the weather meaning that dams could not be accessed or another

landslide dam being reported could completely change plans for the day. A new dam would change the focus to assessing the risk to a downstream population, or a dam could breach and all resources were required there.

A triage system was used for identifying the dams and assessing the risk from them. The initial assessment would rank the dams in order by relative hazard. Then the high-risk dams would be assessed first, or the ones which had the potential to cause the greatest damage or

consequence to a nearby community. There were so many dams and with limited resources they could not all be investigated simultaneously.

Interviewee C:

“We had a triage system and most of them the 190 didn’t affect anybody if they were to fail, so we really homed in on those dams that if they were to fail there is a potential risk.”

“You have only got so many resources so you have got to triage them in some way and so you have to work out which are the important ones to deal with and then tackle them and that importance might actually be logistical and have nothing to do with the risk.”

The identification process took about a week but there was great uncertainty around the dams as there was no guarantee that all of them had been found or located correctly. It was hard to co-ordinate the response in constantly changing environments.

Two challenges that appeared through the response and hindered co-ordination efforts were inconsistency in staff and having too many people involved at once. Often people would come into the response for two or three days and then go again. This meant that new people constantly required briefing on their role and what was happening. This takes up time in an emergency situation. It was also found that at some stages there were too many people involved in the response. Managing people rather than the event itself became an issue and this took too much time away from people who need to be fronting in the response.

As the response to the landslide dams developed over time the co-ordination of the response evolved. It took time to know who was involved and what their roles were. After ten days there was more understanding around the response it was very much a collaborative effort between all the agencies involved.

Interviewee G:

“As we learnt who we needed to co-ordinate with the co-ordination improved before that it wasn't great. There was an element of people doing the same work which isn't necessarily a bad thing as people pick up on different things.”

Part of the co-ordination involved communication between different agencies which as

previously discussed was problematic during some of the response. Whilst communication was occurring between the agencies to better their co-ordination, it sometimes took significant time which meant time spent away from responding to the dams themselves.

Interviewee E:

“We were doing a lot of liaising with GNS and ECAN and at some points I felt like I was between all three organisations just passing comments between the three. It just made life difficult so that was a big aspect of not knowing who was doing what and just making sure we weren't doubling up on work but equally making sure something

wasn't being missed.” Interviewee J:

“There were people we were working with to collect the information and analyse it and there were people we were providing information to for them to keep track of their areas of interest. I had to focus on what I needed to do which was informing the key people and then they could distribute the message further.”

It was felt by the majority of participants that the agencies involved were under-prepared for the landslide dams. The dams did not get included in the overall response to the Kaikoura earthquake damage initially, until the number and size of them were discovered. The landslide dams were not considered to the same degree as other hazards which were more visible such as landslides, coastal uplift and damage to infrastructure.

Interviewee J:

“The critical thing for me is working out what is not being done, it is much harder to sit back and work out what is not being done. It became obvious very quickly that no one in Kaikoura was systematically looking at landslide dams.”

Interviewee Q:

“You have got to have resources early on and monitor early and just being on to it as soon as possible. That is something that if this happened again I would be a lot more onto landslide dams. It was there but it just took a while to come into our

consciousness, wow this is bigger than we thought.”

Several interviewees commented that the landslide dams should have been included as part of the overall co-ordination of the response from the early stages. The dams were not considered by many of the interviewees as their attention was on other land damage. On the day of the Kaikoura earthquake the Clarence River dam breached. This was a large dam and it was lucky that no one was injured or killed by the breach but at this point the risk from dams was very much unknown.

Additional quotes from interviews which relate to the theme of co-ordination are summarised in Table 5.3 below.

5.4.1 Key Research Findings

The results of this research around co-ordination in the response to the Kaikoura landslide dam event identified several key outcomes:

• Interviewees involved in the response felt that they were under prepared. The risk of landslide dams occurring had not been a hazard they were thinking of.

• The co-ordination of the response to the dams had to be flexible as it was a dynamic situation which was constantly changing.

• Having consistency in staff is important to allow for a smooth co-ordination and an efficient response.

• As the response developed, the co-ordination evolved and improved. After ten days more information came to light, and greater understanding of the risk from the dams was gained, the co-ordination became smoother.

5.4.2 Additional Interview Quotes

Table 5.3 – Quotes from interviews about the co-ordination in the response to the landslide dams in Kaikoura.

Sub-theme Interview Quote

Dynamic

Situation F

“We always based our decision about when to go again on what we had seen in the previous flight, instead of going right we will go once every week for the next three months. So we sort of reassessed it each time.”

Triage system

J

“From the initial assessment we could start to rank the relative hazard and from the hazard start looking at the risk and then identify the dams we wanted to go and look at in more detail. The initial evaluation took about a week.”

I

“The uncertainty around the dams made it very hard to deal with. You provide a map of where they all are but there is no guarantee that all of them have been found yet or correctly located. The maps changed constantly and created pressure to what we could say with any certainty.”

Staffing

M

“Some were only coming up for two or three days which don’t get them into the role, and then they are gone. So the longer you can go up there in an emergency the better off I think you get to know what is going on.”

M

“At one stage we were feeling that there were too many people being sent up to Kaikoura so all of a sudden you are managing people rather than manage the event. It just takes your focus away a bit if you have got too many people being thrown at you.”

Co-ordination

evolved G

“The next stage was working with GNS a bit more, GNS started to undertake the more comprehensive identification of the dams. We were helping with the analysis of those dams with what does this mean and how big of a hazard is it. That was very much a collaborative effort between us and GNS and consultants.” Under-prepared P

“The scariest thing that happened with the slip dams was the one in the Clarence, and that one failed before we were even prepared for it, before we had put anything in place.”