Should we be rethinking how we rebuild after storms?

Source: Radio New Zealand

New Zealand’s most common natural hazard is flooding, but we’re often unprepared for it, and more preoccupied with earthquakes or eruptions

It’s the same regions being hit every year – the usual suspects being, broadly, Northland, Auckland, Coromandel, Tairāwhiti, Hawke’s Bay, Nelson, West Coast, and Canterbury.

The storms are destructive, devastating, heartbreaking.

We keep rebuilding – but is it increasingly a fruitless task, soaking up billions? And should we be rethinking the way we’re doing it?

Today the Detail team looks at what’s ahead, and what needs to change so that we’re not talking about the same thing this time next year.

“I always find that Kiwis in particular are born without a lot of the fears of other people,” says Newsroom political reporter Fox Meyer, who is from the US. “I don’t know if it’s the environment or what, but they tend to be a pretty fearless people – and I think that might be reflected in our emergency management planning.”

The Detail’s Gwen McClure, also born in America, agrees.

“I come from a place where it rains really hard about 10 months out of the year, but our infrastructure can handle it,” she says.

“But I think more than that, if you look at a place like the American south, every year they get slammed by hurricanes, but people know how to prepare for that.

“It doesn’t mean that houses aren’t washed away and lives aren’t lost. But people are taping up their windows, filling their bathtubs, stocking up on food and water. In the Midwest where there are tornados, houses all have cellars and people get their kids and their pets down there when a tornado’s coming.

“In California the wildfires are bad but people get go-bags and they know evacuation routes. And I just don’t think we’re there yet. I think we’ve got earthquakes sort of in our collective consciousness, but we don’t really have the idea that flooding is something that happens every year in New Zealand. It’s not part of our national psyche in the same way that earthquakes are, despite the fact that it’s our most common natural disaster, and the fact that two-thirds of us live within five kilometres of the coast.”

Fox Meyer says we are adjusting to the new norm of having storms come through more frequently.

“We might notice that right away but it will take longer for the gears of society, and of insurance companies, and of government, to adjust to that new normal. That’s just how politics works unfortunately.”

He says it’s clear the issue is being taken seriously, and there’s legislative change in the pipeline that was introduced in the wake of the Anniversary Weekend floods in 2023.

“But these are not new concerns,” he says.

“A lot of the feedback on reforms in this sector are people saying ‘we’ve been saying this, we’ve said this before, we knew these vulnerabilities were here, and this event exposed them but that’s not a shock to the people who were aware of it.”

The new Emergency Management Bill has been designed to address failings – it’s at select committee stage now.

But – “of all the things you could ask for funding for, resilience and disaster prep is probably the easiest to communicate why investment is good there.”

However when it comes to investment in infrastructure we’re going to have to get smarter about rebuilding.

“We cannot afford, practically and economically, to just be keeping our heads above water with disaster response. There needs to be an emphasis on not just building back, but building back better, and moving that bridge or redesigning it if we need to so that we don’t just keep replacing things that break.

“Keeping things the way they are now is something that we choose to do because it’s cheaper – but you will pay that cost eventually.”

Those are sentiments echoed by the chief executive of Infrastructure New Zealand, Nick Leggett.

“There is broadly over time an affordability challenge in New Zealand. We’re up against it economically,” he says.

He tells Alexia Russell we need to be having conversations about the infrastructure we choose to keep, and what gets protected and adapted to the changing climate conditions.

To make those decisions, we need to be armed with information – what risk looks like and where the problems are – so we can prioritise investment.

“At the moment we don’t have enough what you would call ‘mitigation funds’, or ‘adaptation funds’. So when a road gets knocked out we’re often building – and hopefully improving a little bit – from that happening again. But simply reinstating is not going to be the long-term answer.”

Leggett says we need to be making the most of new technology to get ahead of problems before they arrive when it comes to making investment choices and building infrastructure.

Part of the problem – “we think best value is lowest cost.”

“We need to be armed with the evidence that if we spend money, that it’s going to reduce the risk of things failing in the future, and that investment also has to be about protecting lives, and livelihoods.

“There are lots of countries around the world that build better than we do, and get better value from what they build. They’ve got a more cooperative way of doing things but they’re also better at having confronting conversations that prioritise where they invest.”

In the medium- to long-term, that might have to be about choice around where people live.

Gisborne is already one of the most isolated cities in the world, but the latest storms cut it off from both ends.

Up to 40 slips are blocking the 60 kilometres of the main gorge linking Gisborne to Opotiki after the area received double its average January rainfall in just 48 hours.

Mayor Rehette Stoltz tells Amanda Gillies she’s incredibly proud of the way the region’s community gets around the table to sort issues, and responds to weather warnings.

“Our community knows what to do,” she says.

One of the issues in securing the Waioweka Gorge route is that it’s not in her region, so working with district council neighbours and the government on solutions is a priority.

“I think our region deserves it,” she says. “We have more than our fair share here. I do believe we deserve a break.”

Another major issue with the continual storms is insurance, and in the podcast Gwen McClure talks to RNZ climate change journalist Kate Newton about skyrocketing premiums, and dealing with the problems of uninsurable properties.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand