Video: Hawke's Bay Cyclone response heading into recovery phase
Hawke’s Bay’s response to the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle is heading towards the transition into recovery, the region’s Civil Defence Emergency Management Group Controller Ian Macdonald says.
“At the moment, there's a lot of work being done by the councils around developing their recovery structures at a local level and at a regional level. We are actually preparing what we call a transition to recovery report and transitioning some of those outstanding response tasks across to the recovery organisation.”
Macdonald says there is still support for individual people who require access to welfare services. A free-call helpline number 0800 117 672 was set up last month. The number operates from 8am to 8pm on weekdays and from 8am to 4.15pm on weekends.
“This means that the more complex cases around welfare that are coming up are going to the right central government agencies and health agencies so that people get the support that they need.”
Macdonald says a focus of his team is supporting isolated communities a month after the cyclone.
“That needs to be continued on and that has to be a seamless transition into the recovery. We've got about 28 isolated communities that we are dealing with directly.”
“There's a number of what we call hubs within each of those communities. Supplies get dropped off and then get distributed. We're continuing to work on that.”
Macdonald says the recovery will be long-term and will “go on for many, many months”.
He says the definition of isolation is a community that has no way of getting into town to get vital supplies like food and medicine.
“It generally means they're isolated by road. We need to either use the army in terms of its four wheel drive vehicles, trucks to get in there, or we use helicopters to drop off supplies.”
Macdonald says some of the most affected areas are Rissington Puketitiri, Tutira and parts of Wairoa district.
Macdonald also praised communities that came up with initiatives to get across rivers.
“A lot of those things are community initiatives and that's great because that's what communities should do. Obviously we are concerned about safety and making sure that we are able to provide them with some advice around things like river levels when we have rain and those sorts of things.”
“We are supporting those sorts of in initiatives, but generally those are community led.”
The Group Controller says that the issue fo Hawke’s Bay is that given the damage to the region’s river systems, “when we have raink we need to be really careful”.
“ We work with regional council on that. Obviously the regional council has lowered its trigger levels for notifying us that the river levels are rising. We've got stock bank issues, which are being worked on but that will take a bit of time.”
“That is really our biggest concern in terms of safety. We are lucky we've got a nice period of fine weather and that's going to continue into next week apparently. That will be good for the ongoing recovery and clean-up, but that's our primary concern at the moment.”
