Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Pete George,
I don’t think sub 1% parties should be discounted.
They only get lumped into "other" when they don't have an electorate seat and they're < 1%. ALCP, Libz, etc, they're never going to get enough votes to matter. UF, Act, Mana, they only break the rule because they have sitting MPs so every votes for them does count.
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Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Hebe,
Was the coroner’s call that things should have been done better or that they could have been done better?
He uses the word "could" (Para 139), but some of the criticism does appear to be more of the "should" variety.
Having now read his findings (I hadn't read beyond the summaries), my speculation appears to have been pretty accurate. NZFS personnel on the ground, who included USAR TF2 technicians and the TF2 team leader, did not establish an incident management structure because they were occupied with doing those things that were immediately necessary on their arrival as NZFS personnel. None of the senior officers present in Christchurch by midnight of 22/2-23/2 did anything more than show up at CTV as part of city-wide reconnaissance, but even if they had assumed command they would have been trying to assemble an IMT to manage an incident that had organically separated into two sectors with sector commanders but had no overall management and no established ICP.The failure to set up an ICP/IMT actually fell down in the first hour, when the initial-responding police officers who commenced rescue operations failed to hand over management of the incident to the first-arriving fire appliance (which didn't manage to arrive until 42 minutes post quake), since the presence of fire made the incident the responsibility of NZFS. It was all down-hill from there.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
"Our poll shows National is (highly) likely to have 56 to 58 MPs."
Not hard.
It's only "not hard" for the point where you're discussing National, Labour, and the Greens. After that it's really, really uncertain.
UF will probably get Dunne back into Parliament, but it's not totally certain. Likewise Act and Seymour, but even less certain since he has no history and Epsom's relationship with pegged noses and voting for the tea-drinking candidate may come to an end.
The Maori Party might vanish this election; they've been the overhang every time they've been in Parliament, but a diminishing one, and with Sharples and Turia standing down it could become a party of one or even a party of none if Flavell gets the flick because of his association with a National government that has not, the Party's protestations to the contrary, been particularly good to Maori.
Then there's NZF, whose parliamentary presence on 21 September could as easily be zero as it is the current six.Ranges of MPs in Parliament is good only when there's a certainty that the party will be present at all. For every party except the top three that's a fickle possibility, and this election looks to be particularly interesting for the small parties.
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Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Sacha,
none of the officers set up the management structure into which senior officers would ordinarily step
how come?
I can only speculate, but it’s educated speculation: the initial arriving appliances were confronted with an event of a scale not seen in modern NZ. The SO/SSO-level officers, arriving disjointedly (rather than as an organised response) at a complex operation requiring many strands of work that were related but independent, took charge of their crew and maybe one other and went to work on the immediate need: surface and lightly-trapped casualties. With so much to be done, and too few hands, it would become a bunch of parts working individually with no coordination amongst the officers to set up a proper incident management structure. A job the size of CTV requires an IMT of at least four (would have ultimately been more than double that), and the individual component groups working on the pile also need supervision. Breaking out first-arriving station-level officers to establish an incident management framework wasn’t going to happen because those officers were needed as boots on the ground.
See Mark Montgomery’s earlier comment, and he’s speaking as a senior-ranked officer in a volunteer rural fire brigade. He describes an event where there was no overall command, no larger CIMS structure, just a bunch of groups doing their thing. That’s not unexpected when the response is not coherent (and could never have been coherent) so does not have the structure that normally applies to an NZFS response. The normal pattern of a response is that a first alarm is dispatched composed of a predetermined group of appliances, and the officer on the first-arriving appliance is the Incident Controller until relieved. That appliance is the Incident Control Point unless and until another one is established. Subsequent-arriving appliances report to that ICP, incoming senior officers report to that ICP, and as an incident grows the role of IC (or at least OIC Fire if the Police are the agency in overall charge) changes hands in an orderly fashion. At all times in the normal scheme of things there is clearly one fire officer in charge at a single ICP, that officer knows what the overall mission is, and everyone arriving knows who they report to. 22/2 was an event where there is no certainty of additional appliances arriving, or when they will arrive, because there were so many competing demands on NZFS resources. If the first officer on scene decided that they were going to take up an overall management role, that would have meant they might be putting their three fire fighters onto a rubble pile with no direct supervision, breaking the buddy system (always work in pairs), and possibly to no greater use because it could have been a very long time before any other NZFS resources arrived. A common theme from people who were involved in response on the day is that they knew how bad it was where they were but they had no idea what it looked like elsewhere in Christchurch. An officer looking at the ruins of CTV and feeling the aftershocks would have been rightly entitled to think that they were on their own because the rest of Christchurch was going to be, to use the vernacular, very munted. Without that first OIC/ICP established, trying to get any SO/SSO-level officer to pull back and take overall command was unlikely to ever happen. They were actively involved in rescues and fire suppression activity, and those things had to keep on happening.
The failing of the senior officers was in seeing the command vacuum for what it was and establishing the necessary IMT structure. Doing it from scratch is not something they regularly do, or train for; they train to step into an orderly structure in an orderly way with an orderly hand-over from the existing incident controller. Knowing how to do that and run an incident, it turns out, doesn’t translate to being able to recognise a lack of order and then take the necessary steps to create that order.
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Hard News: A Big Thing, in reply to Chris Werry,
As I understand it there’s no provision for a bus way on the expanded NW motorway – just shoulder lanes.
Correct. NZTA weren't interested. And, of course, no money is available for those kinds of capital works under the current government's policy statement on transport spending. It's all being sucked up by the Roads of (extremely) Dubious Significance.
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Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Sacha,
It's a hugely complex topic, and hard to explain in writing why it's wrong to presume that it ought to be easy for emergency managers to just step into running a complex, demanding incident when they haven't actually got the easy structure that exists in training exercises and smaller incidents. The normal way of things is that a defined response is sent to a call, and as required the response escalates in a defined way with higher levels of notifications bringing defined responses from on-call officers but those officers also being free to respond themselves at any point earlier on. And as the response escalates and more resources arrive, there's always one person who's in charge. Always. But CTV wasn't like that because the appliances that arrived first self-tasked and none of the officers set up the management structure into which senior officers would ordinarily step. There were multiple incidents, effectively, and they needed to be run both individually and collectively. Taking the step back and doing the coalescence of management that's required requires knowing that that's required, and you can talk and talk and talk about how those officers should have known to do that, but an intellectual appreciation isn't the same thing as it being an instinct that will kick in at a time when all you have is adrenaline and muscle memory.
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Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Sacha,
Quite so – which is why it’s drilled into em beforehand. The military seem to manage it.
With respect, Sacha, whatever you think you know about emergency management isn’t up to critiquing the response. If you dragged an army unit away from their daily tasks with no warning (remember that zero-notice military action is largely unheard-of), dumped them into pitched battle, and expected the commanders to immediately deliver a coherent tactical and strategic plan at the drop of a hat, it wouldn’t happen. They’d muddle through, but unless they’d had strategic warning of what was coming the higher-level officers would have been stuck. They’d also have the advantage of absolutely-certain roles and chains of command, neither of which exists in NZFS in terms of management of an incident because senior officers rotate on and off call so at no particular point is a specific office going to be represented at a call; it’s no use saying that the Chief Fire Officer of Christchurch district is the planning officer and their Deputy CFO is the logistics officer and the Assistant Area Manager is the incident controller, because it’s quite possible that not a single one of those three would be at an incident. Changing that fluid management structure would be a huge failure, because it would enforce a structure that doesn’t recognise the lack of specialisation that exists in the fire service. It would also limit the opportunities for lower-ranked officers (the operational officers who ride trucks every day, and run smaller incidents every day) to get experience as managers of larger incidents.
You speak of getting to know officers from other services, and NZFS senior officers do (inter-agency exercises happen regularly, because CD groups must run them), but the corresponding ranks from the police don’t tend to show their faces at incidents; they’re cosy in an emergency operations centre somewhere, being all strategic and shit. You’d never get a deputy commissioner showing up to anything less than the likes of CTV, and certainly they wouldn’t spend hours and hours there in a command role, but the area management from NZFS do it all the time. Show up, take up slots in the incident management team (either as controller or as a supporting role to mentor the controller), and get their boots dirty. But they don’t have relationships with the inspectors and senior sergeants who are running the police operation. Ranks get to know like ranks, so when CD runs a big table-top exercise the senior brass from both sides gather and play their parts and then promulgate the lessons down through their respective organisations. The inspectors and senior sergeants get to know the senior station officers and station officers, maybe the deputy chief fire officers and the chief fire officers. But when the shit hits big NZFS expects more-senior people to show up at the scene and run the show while the police leave lower-ranked-but-still-senior officers to handle the on-scene management. It’s partly to do with ratios of officers to crew. For a career fire appliance with a crew of four, there’s one officer and three fire fighters (with anywhere between one and three of those fire fighters being ranked as senior FFs). A station officer is equivalent to a police sergeant, a senior station officer to a senior sergeant. In a big city there will be at least one senior station officer in an area of three or four fire stations, so a ratio of roughly one SSO to three SOs to 12 FFs (three on the truck the SSO came on). The police might have one sergeant to a half-dozen (senior) constables, and a single senior sergeant to an entire policing district. The ratios just don’t give equivalence for relationships between services. Officers above SSO show up to any mid-size emergency, but for the police it has to be pretty special to get an inspector to the scene.
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Hard News: A Big Thing, in reply to linger,
Named by a school child in a competition. Tunnel boring machines are always given female names, and NZTA held a contest to name the TBM that we now know as Alice.
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Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Sacha,
If any emergency organisation isn’t regularly practising collaboration that scales up, they really can’t claim to be prepared.
In theory (and practice for routine events like major fires, even really big ones that have a hundred or more NZFS personnel plus other agencies) the Coordinated Incident Management System does scale up. And NZFS utilises CIMS at varying scales for every single job, every single day, and works with other agencies every single day. Exercises are a regular thing, too, both within agencies and at the local and regional CD level.
CIMS is derived from the United States’ Incident Command System, which scales all the way up to management of California wildfires (its genesis was California in the 1970s, in fact) that cost 10s-of-millions of dollars and utilise thousands of personnel. CIMS is scalable in design, but it’s got some weaknesses in application to the very largest incidents that, unfortunately, only show up when it’s used in anger. An exercise is always artificial unless it’s incredibly well designed, and designing an exercise to test events of the scale of 22/2 is really, really, really difficult. Incredibly difficult. Did I mention it’s difficult? It can be done in a computer simulator, sure, but that’s extremely artificial and the officers involved know it’s a simulation so it lacks a lot of the chaos and adrenaline that come into play in a real event.
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Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
There is no obligation on any particular senior officer to take over just because they’re the highest-ranked officer on the scene.
Just to be clear, if the officer who is in charge is both junior and not coping, the senior officer is expected to take over. And the senior officer is just as much in the gun as the junior, coping or not, if something goes wrong. But seniority does not automatically confer command/control responsibilities.