Our recent virtual event was a discussion between Paul Prouse (founder of Astro Intelligence Systems) and Kumeroa Papauni-Tuhaka, (Intelligence Manager for the Tairāwhiti Emergency Management Office). Together, they examined the reality of developing intelligence in an emergency situation, with reference to Kumeroa’s personal insights gained during the weather events since 2022. The following is a summary of the key points.
Practice is incredibly important. For Kumeroa and his team, 2022 was a busy year anyway, with their team being activated on a number of occasions. Through these events they had built up relationships with regional partners and organisations such as FENZ and NZ Police, and so they understood what each agency and team would be doing. These events were relatively small scale but allowed the team to work through the challenges they would face in a bigger event. How would they communicate? What would each agencies’ response be? What extra resources might be required? Kumeroa felt that his team and the regional response was much stronger than it might otherwise have been as a result of these frequent activations.
These events also led to the team to realise that their processes were not working effectively. At the start of 2022, the team was responding to a 10-day flooding event using excel to track information and emails. They acknowledged that there had to be a better way of working and so they started connecting with others, asking how they tracked information, how they shared and displayed it. There was no money for an enterprise solution, so eventually the team developed their own version of a Common Operating Picture (COP)/Intelligence dashboard that served their needs, identified through repeated practice and coordination. It was developed at no cost to the taxpayer and helps the decision-makers and intelligence team better understand and visualise the priorities from the immense amount of information that comes into the headquarters during a crisis. This was only achieved through talking and sharing knowledge with other disciplines, other teams, and other intelligence groups. (Note from editor: The team have been recognised nationally for this system at both the Local Government New Zealand Awards and the Taituarā Excellence Awards.)
This learning from other teams was a recurrent topic throughout the discussion. January 2023 saw the east coast of New Zealand impacted by Cyclone Hale followed swiftly by the Auckland Anniversary Floods later that month. Kumeroa explained how the whole EM team looked at the responses to those events. His team already had processes in place, but the January events acted as a catalyst for reviewing them and understanding the weak points of the EM Group’s response planning.
Another thing that can be done before an event is building the relationships with other agencies. During the Cyclone Gabrielle event, there were multiple inter-agency conversations that were open and transparent. A lot of the honesty in these conversations came from the fact that partnerships between organisations had been built up previously. Kumeroa acknowledged that the region was so small, there was no excuse not to be able to connect on all levels, particularly when there’s time to prepare. The inter-agency relationships with community-based agencies such as FENZ, NZ Police, and neighbouring councils was already present, so access to information and resources was much easier. Despite technological challenges, everyone understood the bigger picture and that they were all working toward the same response.
Kumeroa acknowledged that they were fortunate to have a period of pre-warning to help them prepare for Cyclone Gabrielle. It became clear about 72 hours before the cyclone made impact that the region was going to be affected. During this time there were constant collective conversations around actions to be taken, what transition would look like, and even issues such as how they would rest themselves emotionally, physically, and mentally during the event. They also listed all their assumptions and checked in with local partners to discuss them. There were a lot of really open conversations such as ‘how are we going to handle this?’, ‘what information requirements will we have?’, and ‘what are our current information gaps?’. The decision was made to forward-deploy Kumeroa with a Starlink communications system to the eastern-most part of the region as it looked like it would take the brunt of the impact and was at risk of becoming isolated from the rest of the response.
Once the cyclone hit, Kumeroa was responsible for providing communications and collecting information on the local response to assist the headquarters staff with their effects-based decision-making. Building those local relationships and communicating effectively with people was key to success at this point. Processes were put in place to collect information either verbally or on paper, but it was clear that adapting his communication style to people’s circumstances was more important. His message to people was to keep communicating in the way that they wanted—it might mean that his team received a long list of every single thing affecting a group, but at least then the priorities could be correctly identified by working through it. Teaching people the principles of what was needed and why was far more important than teaching them to fill in a form correctly.
It was readily apparent that gaining good insights relied on having the ability to engage with the people giving the information. He used the example of one group who said they were fine and needed no help. He started probing, what did that mean, what did fine look like for them? It turned out that the school had flooded. A few more questions revealed that there were some people trapped, but the community was sorting it. Getting to the key information required being able to have those deeper conversations respectfully, leaving those he spoke to with a sense of comfort and assurance, encouraging them to keep the lines of communication open.
Back at the headquarters, much of the risk was related to information flow as opposed to access to information. Everyone was willing to share but it took a lot of time for information to be properly prioritised and for the key messages to be spread to the appropriate teams. One example was email. When communications came back up, there were so many emails and people could only process so much. Often it was easier to pick up the phone or talk face-to-face, but even with that, it could take a couple of hours for critical information to be shared effectively and actioned. It became a focus point for the team to improve the flow and prioritisation of information.
Part of improving the flow was to develop a rhythm for information-sharing. From the intelligence point of view, everyone was a source, not just the official collectors, but the aunty or uncle on the phone, or the person on the street who had just passed a previously unknown problem. The intelligence group had to be quite cutthroat at times on what was priority information and what could be processed later. It was helpful to share this with everyone, including the public volunteers. Several times a day there would be a call with up to 40 people on it, gathering new information, sharing the current response priorities, asking questions such as ‘is this road still the main focus or do we need to pivot?’. Not everyone had internet access, but there was also radio access, and the timings sometimes didn’t work because something would crop up, but at least attempting to have a consistent time and place for communication was of huge benefit. The locals had reassurance that they could reach out for help and that their voice would be heard.
Another challenge related to the people being assigned to the intelligence team. So many people were cycled through to help the team, and they all had different skills and focuses, and often no experience of intelligence. Kumeroa believed that attempting to mould all these people the same way would create resistance and so he instead would work hard to understand the person, their strengths, and to figure out how to integrate them effectively. Taking 5 or 10 minutes to ask them how they worked, how they liked to receive information, what they needed to be effective was incredibly important to achieving better results.
The Institute would like to thank Paul and Kumeroa for giving up their time to share these insights with the wider community.