Review of the Tsunami Evacuation 2017

CDEM will provide more regular updates to the call centre to enable operators to give more detailed
and up to date responses to callers.
The Mayor and Councillors require information and updates as soon as an event is being monitored by
the CDEM Duty Officer. This enables them to provide assurance and direction to the residents and for
the Mayor to be briefed to respond to media enquiries.
Recommendations
In the event the EOC is activated, CDEM should send a representative to the ECC to enable the
dissemination of information received by Group from MCDEM and decisions made by Group to be
communicated through that one representative back to CDEM and the EOC. This will be more easily
achieved once the Precinct is established.
The CDEM Duty Officer and CDEM team should focus on communications from MCDEM, Group and
other agencies in order to evaluate situations and make decisions. The Procedure should clarify that
the CDEM Duty Officer will enlist the support of PIM, as soon as the CDEM Duty Officer begins to
monitor an event. This will provide greater resources to enable clear consistent messaging to
residents.
CDEM, PIM and EOC need to work together to streamline each of their processes and ensure that they
nicely align. All processes should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis to keep them up to date
and responsive to lessons learnt from previous events.
In order to avoid inconsistent messaging to the public, PIM should monitor messaging from other
agencies/the media during an event to provide updates to the CDEM Duty Officer and the Local
Controller.
The General Manager who manages Civil Defence within the Council should be responsible for keeping
the Mayor and Councillors informed on a regular basis throughout an event. This means that the Duty
Officer and Local Controller need to provide the GM with information on a regular basis.
To summarise the recommended lines of communication –
• the Duty Officer (with support from CDEM team) focuses on receiving and interpreting
messages from MCDEM, Group, other agencies, call centre, welfare centres, and providing
information to the Local Controller, Duty PIM, GM, call centre and welfare centres regularly.
• the Duty PIM focuses on receiving and interpreting information from the Duty Officer, Local
Controller and the EOC, and providing regular information to the public and the media.
• the Local Controller focuses on receiving information from the Duty Officer and making
decisions, then communicating those decisions to the Duty Officer, PIM and the GM.
• the GM focuses on receiving information from the Local Controller and the Duty Officer and
keeping the Mayor and Councillors informed.
It is important that the above people are working within the same building, preferably the emergency
operations centre, for ease of communication, and that they wear their civil defence vests so that
people’s roles can easily be identified.
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