Canterbury floods - Ashburton District Council

Major weather events and natural disasters are a stressful time for communities. They always demand clear communications to guide people through. In May 2021, Ashburton District Council asked us to support its Civil Defence response when the district was battered by a one-in-200-year flood event.

As the Council activated its Emergency Operations Centre and a State of Emergency was declared, it became clear this major incident would need a round-the-clock response. Our team came on board to support the Council’s Public Information Management (PIM).

PIMs are a dedicated function of the framework that New Zealand Civil Defence and partner agencies use to coordinate, command, and control incident responses of any scale – from local events to nationwide disasters.

Two of our team are PIM-trained and can jump into the fast-paced environment of a Civil Defence crisis with ease. This happened on 30 May 2021 as intense rainfall began filling the Ashburton/Hakatere river catchment and flood water threatened to breach the stopbanks protecting homes.

Our work included coordinating swift public information updates across the Council’s communication channels, developing and issuing press releases, and briefing the Mayor for media stand-ups.

While the river stopbanks thankfully prevented many homes from flooding, the Ashburton Bridge on State Highway 1 was forced to close, which combined with other road closures, meant there was no transport route connecting the South Island, cutting off all communities south of Ashburton. A lot of farmland, particularly alongside the river, was severely damaged.

We worked with the Council for several days during the flood, and we were pleased to help ensure the community could get through the emergency as well as possible.