  |
24 Hours: Lamorna CooperThe Timaru Herald 16 November 2010
A typical day can often start at two or four in the morning. I might get a text to say that there's been an earthquake or that there's been a significant weather warning, or I might get a phone call from the flood guys at ECan to say that there are issues with rivers. I'm in the office by 8.30am and my first role of the day is to clear the overnight emails and check the weather forecast. Emails could be from MetService or GeoNet event warnings, or could be requests from members of the public to contact them – they come through our website – or they could be requests for assistance from neighbouring emergency management officers. We're a fairly close unit, there aren't very many of us, and we're all under-resourced, so we assist each other whenever possible. From the public, there could be requests to help with evacuation plans; my role primarily is communication and education, so a lot of my time is spent on the phone and with emails discussing how people can create evacuation plans for schools, kindies, businesses. When there's just one of you, you need to be fairly smart with your time, so you get into a routine. You're tending to work on your feet very fast. I get requests to do community presentations to service organisations, groups of immigrants, or a group of mothers, or people who are involved with a kindy association. And I have a lot of communication with people who are wanting more information on becoming a volunteer or who are volunteering. Then there's a lot of administrative stuff, organising gear and equipment for meetings and stuff like that. There's looking at things like resourcing community emergency centres. I could be organising people to be involved in monitoring the sirens when they go off; every time it goes off, we're telling people it's happening, then there's the call-up, and checking they have been heard. My job is to make people aware, and sometimes to do that you have to unsettle them, you have to shake the tree occasionally to make it grow better. A lot of other stuff in the background is preparing, training – training is a huge part of what I do. I train emergency operation centre staff, I provide training for controllers who manage the emergency event, and provide training for volunteers. And I'm dealing with support for the volunteers as well as the people affected by the event. This book here; it's 200 pages – I'm going through one of those every six months, and every little item in here is something I need to do. I either need to phone someone or arrange training for a group of people. There's also the work we do as part of the Canterbury group, we work with our partner agencies locally and regionally. I'm involved in a number of regional committees looking at things like telecommunications and response planning. And I'm on the committee of Neighbourhood Support South Canterbury. That's really important, identifying existing networks and re-using them. Advertising, that's the education aspect as well. My budget is well and truly used, but I think that's really important. We have a programme for early childhood education providers, based around the turtle-safe concept, specifically for earthquakes, and I'll help kindies to develop their own emergency plans. I support the "what's the plan, Stan" programme in schools. It's a Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management plan, based around identifying hazards and knowing what to do when something happens. I can talk to the kids about why they did certain things, and encourage them to go back and talk about it with their parents. And they do go back to their parents, I've been bailed up and told, "thanks very much, I've just spent the weekend quakesafing the water tank because my seven-year-old came home and told me off". Which is brilliant, that's the result I want. The number of phone calls I've received since the Canterbury earthquake, from people wanting information or knowing where to go to get the information, has increased exponentially. I'm spending more time answering emails and talking to people on the phone. For me, it's about increasing the civil defence network by using existing networks; fire service, police, St John, Red Cross, Neighbourhood Support, Salvation Army. They're all part of the solution. And what our volunteers do is increase that response capability and they also improve the knowledge during and after an event. There's a wee bit of that "she'll be right" attitude, and that "we've been OK before, so we will be OK again". I think the Canterbury earthquake has shown how much resources we have to bring in from elsewhere. Because a lot of the people who were involved in that response in Canterbury were from the North Island. We could have been this close to having a different situation. When we get the Alpine Fault earthquake, we are likely to be in the same situation as Christchurch, and so will Waimate, Mackenzie, Ashburton. So rather than our neighbours providing resources for one or two districts, we will all be needing assistance, and that's why it's important that we have good relationships with our neighbours. I can be sourcing physical resources for our area headquarters or welfare centres. I've got to go and order some plastic bins for Geraldine – it's those little things that take up time. I don't have the luxury of having others to do that work for me. So I turn up in the suit and attend the flash meetings, but I also have to clean the toilets. Anyone who works in community service has to be prepared to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. I'll have on average about one meeting a week, and I'm just looking at the training schedule for next year, which is just about every Thursday evening for the year. So I have to organise the venue, who's attending, and in some cases, trainers. In the last 18 months, I've taken the baseline to set up an Area HQ kind of thing and test the radio, so what I consider to be an appropriate and current level of training, based on community expectations; what the community expects to get during an event; and making sure that our volunteers are safe too and that they can cope with what we are asking them to do. Later in the day I'll start looking at the weather forecasts again, especially so if there's a weather front coming through. I'll need to know if it's going to arrive at the weekend, and who is going to be around that I can ring. Part of the planning too is research, a fair bit of research to make sure that you are current, that your knowledge is current and that you are utilising people to the best of your abilities. I'm usually out of here about 5.30pm, 6pm, but my day will probably end around 10 when I'll do a last look at the weather forecast. You're basically in contact 24/7. Whatever you do in emergency management you have to be passionate about; nothing is easy, nothing is done in five minutes, it takes a lot of time, and takes a lot of negotiation, because you are always asking people to do things, always asking them to be involved. Some of the criticism of civil defence, I think, is about misconception, or a perception that's based on something that happened 30 years ago, and many of those people who were involved 30 years ago are no longer around, and there has been nobody to replace them. But in two weeks' time, I've got a training session for new volunteers, and there are 25 people with their names on the list. After work, I might take the dogs for a walk, plant some veges, visit family and friends. Sometimes I might get home and I don't want to talk to anybody, I just want to groom our dog or read the newspaper. I find sometimes I can become quite antisocial, because I'm always dealing with people through the week. I can go down town to have lunch and come back two hours' later, because every third or fourth person wants to have a chat with you. You're always doing your job, it's not something you can just switch off.
|
