Brownlee unloads on GeoNet

Acting Civil Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee has doubled down his attacks on GeoNet.

Last Tuesday, the quake-monitoring agency’s director, Ken Gledhill, told media GeoNet needed a funding boost to allow for 24/7 staffing of quake sensors and tsunami alerts. Currently, two staff are on-call for night shift for emergencies, and there are automated alerts. Dr Gledhill says there always need to be a human set of eyes, and that staff called in under the present regime are weary from the day shift.

In an NBR ONLINE poll, a big majority of readers agreed with Dr Gledhill.

But Mr Brownlee says 24/7 staffing would not have made any difference “on the day” – the day of course being last Monday when the 7.8M Kaikoura quake kit.

“They’ve operated like this for a long time, and I don’t think the 24-7 personnel being there makes any difference to the sensor arrangements they’ve got placed around the country in tidal areas and the international connections that they use as part of a global network to assess what’s happened in earthquakes,” Mr Brownlee told Q+A on Sunday.

Mr Brownlee says he’s waiting to hear see the result of a Civil Defence/EQC/GeoNet working party, which was founded in 2015 and is due to report in the New Year.

And talking to NBR Radio yesterday evening, Mr Brownlee had more harsh words for GeoNet.

“We [the government] were very surprised to hear GeoNet going out with that in the heat of the response to a disaster to have GeoNet out there pitching for more funding – that was a little bit off. Particularly because some investigation carried out today [November 21] and a request from us to tell us how many times they’ve actually spoken to the government about this reveals that they’ve never spoken to the government about this. They’ve only mentioned it to Civil Defence at an administrative level,” he said.

“So I’m actually quite surprised to be so blind-sided by an organisation that has previously touted itself as being internationally of high regard. Clearly, it has now come to the conclusion that it's not so good as it thought it was. And that’s a deep disappointment to the government.”

111 failure understandable
Beyond early confusion over the tsunami alert, the 111 emergency calling system operated by Spark was inaccessible for around 30 minutes after the Kaikoura quake.

Mr Brownlee says he accepts Spark’s explanation that there was human error involved in what was supposed to be a hand-off from an emergency calling centre in central Wellington to a backup site in Porirua. He says the unusually long, rolling nature of the quake makes the error understandable. He says he’s confident protocols have been established to prevent the mistake happening again.

SMS alert system on the way – but tired of talking about it
Over the weekend, Mr Brownlee said the government was working with phone companies on a text-based alert system. If it goes ahead, it will involve Spark, Vodafone and 2degrees pushing txt messages to their customers' screens in the event of a tsunami alert. However, Civil Defence says the system could be up to 18 months away. Mr Brownlee earlier said he had requested a hurry-up.

“Yes, you have heard some talk about it [an SMS alert system]. I’m not saying any more about it because I’m sick to death of talking about it. We need one and we’re going to get one."