At 3.30am on the morning of February 14, Napier Mayor Kirsten Wise got the call to come in and declare a state of emergency with Hastings Mayor Sandra Hazlehurst. 

As she made the 20-minute drive from her home to the council's office in the centre of Napier, Wise drove past fallen trees and branches everywhere. 

"There were times when I was sort of thinking, 'oh, maybe I should have woken up my partner and made him bring me in his four-wheel drive rather than jumping in my council car'. But thankfully it was a short drive and I got here very quickly."

For most of the night, she had felt her three-storey home "literally swaying" as Cyclone Gabrielle "raged outside".

"I got the phone call at about 3.30am to say: 'We need you to come in. Our advice is that you and Sandra jointly declare a state of emergency'.

"I managed to get into the office where the Emergency Operations Centre was set up here in this Cape View building pretty much within about 20 minutes. And we got on the phone to Sandra and she and I just had the civil defence team talk us through what they were starting to see happening. We pretty quickly agreed with their advice and declared our joint state of emergency."

Once in the office, she began getting texts and Facebook messages from "people out in the community who were in trouble, people that were on their roofs". 

She was quickly relaying that information to her team so they could share it more widely with emergency services. 

"But again, I was just sitting there thinking, 'wow, what's happening out there? This is huge. This is something that we've never experienced before'.

"It was really hard and also really hard knowing... at this stage it was still dark, it was still raining very heavily... and knowing that the first responders out there were actually experiencing their own challenges to go and help these people.

"So I think it would be fair to say that during those early hours of the morning of the actual cyclone event, there were people that just like me, I think, felt frustrated because we would've liked to be probably doing some things a lot faster than we could, but we did still need to ensure that we were keeping everybody safe."

"And I reflect and remember we had a meeting with Civil Defence on the Monday, sort of late afternoon, early evening it was, where they just gave us some suggestions, recommendations based on the modelling that they'd done from the weather forecast and what we were expecting. And there certainly had been no indication of the gravity of the event we were about to experience at all."

They had been advised that each of the councils should set up their emergency operations team "just to be on the safe side".

"And thank goodness we did, because it did mean that we were immediately able to activate once we realised how dangerous it was and how bad it was getting and hit the ground running from there." 

Wise says the most challenging part of the disaster was the loss of telecommunications and the loss of the ability to communicate with her community.

"It was just so frustrating to know that people were literally in the dark with no power, had no ability to communicate with their loved ones, no ability to let their loved ones know either here in Napier or nationwide or in the world that they were okay."

It was five days before power was restored. And even then, it was only 15 per cent of the city. 

"It took another good week before slowly the city came back online with power." They also had no access in or out.

"I think back and remember the lines of cars lining up to get fuel and the petrol stations having to ration the fuel because of course we couldn't get any more into the city. The supermarkets running out of food on the shelves. And then just those really simple things you don't think about like you couldn't pay by EFTPOS, because there's no power and people typically don't have cash, and ATMs weren't working.

"It's quite mind-blowing. It's all these things we just take for granted as part of our day-to-day lives. And we lost all of that for a number of days. So to me now, one of the key focuses is ensuring that that never happens to our community again. In this day and age, in a city of this size, we should not be put into that position." 

One of the most "heartening things about the whole experience" is the people who went above and beyond, Wise says.

"Strangers helping strangers, people pushing themselves out of their own comfort zone so that they could provide comfort to others. And the volunteer groups, the churches, the community organisations, the schools, the list is endless.

"In addition to, of course, all of our professional first responders who, again, did more than what they would be expected to do. So many of them, at times, put aside their own personal safety to help someone else, which I know we don't encourage but that's human nature. You're going to help people when you see people in trouble and there are just countless, countless stories of absolutely incredibly heroic actions."

For Napier City Council, their focus has been on rebuilding their infrastructure and working with the region's other councils on roading infrastructure and silt removal. 

"And for us here in Napier in particular, ensuring that those lifelines, which we're not directly responsible for, so again, that's the challenge for us because we can't fund it, we can't make the decisions around how to build resilience into the power network and how to build resilience into the telecommunications network. So we need to just work really hard on behalf of our community and advocate those organisations in central government to ensure those investments are made."

Wise says one of the key lessons for her, that came out of an internal review, was around their internal resourcing "to actually be able to step up and provide the response required for an event of this magnitude".

"And to be fair, I don't think that came as a huge surprise to us. We knew that we needed to build capacity in that space. In an unprecedented event like this... you need people there to be able to be responsive and just get stuck in for those initial few days in particular. So I think that's one that we're really focused on now, building that capacity, ensuring we've got the right level of funding to have the staff and have them trained and have them ready if we should ever find ourselves in this position again."

Wise recognises the last 12 months have been "very different" for so many people.

"There's parts of our community, obviously that have been absolutely devastated and who are very much recovering, who are grieving their loved ones that they've lost, who are still in the middle of rebuilding or going through the voluntary buyout process. And so for those people, it's been a long 12 months and they're not at the end of their journey yet.

"Other parts of our community obviously have fully moved on, and I know they're still very sensitive to the needs of those who are not in a position to move on yet. So really it's about us supporting all of our community in the way that's most appropriate for them."

Watch the accompanying video to see the full interview with Napier Mayor Kirsten Wise. 

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