Following last week’s brush with Cyclone Vaianu, I was asked a question that sounds simple but isn’t: “Who is actually in charge of Civil Defence in Hawke’s Bay?”

It’s a fair question – and not an easy one to answer. And it matters, because this time we did push warnings out early, with clear messaging and multiple alerts urging evacuation and caution across affected coastal areas. Yet even then, confusion remains about who is responsible for what.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a disaster as “an unexpected event”. Which is technically correct, but in Hawke’s Bay also deeply misleading. Cyclones, floods, coastal inundation, river breaches and slips are not unexpected here. They are recurring, mapped, modelled and warned about. We know where they happen and more often than not we know roughly when.

Oxford also defines Civil Defence as “an organised system designed to protect people, property and the environment during emergencies”. A system – not a building, a siren or a single authority – one that only works when the people within it understand how it functions, where responsibility sits and what is expected of them.

And then there is that loaded word, “woke”. Once meaning simply being awake or aware, it has since been turned into a term of ridicule – particularly when conversations about responsibility or preparedness become uncomfortable. In emergency management, awareness is not ideological. It is essential.

Civil Defence Emergency Management in Hawke’s Bay is governed by a Joint Committee made up of the Chair of the Regional Council and the Mayors of Napier, Hastings, Wairoa and Central Hawke’s Bay. These members hold voting rights. The committee also includes advisory representatives from mana whenua and an independent specialist. Governance is genuinely shared, with the Chair of the Committee appointed each triennium and able to be drawn from any of those leaders. No single council is “in charge”. Collectively, we are accountable to our communities when the system performs – and especially when it does not.

However, governance is not the same thing as operational response and this distinction matters far more than we often explain.

Each city and district council in Hawke’s Bay maintains its own emergency management unit, with its own staff, plans, emergency operations centre, welfare arrangements and relationships with Police, Fire and Emergency NZ, iwi and community organisations. Those council units are responsible for both the governance and the practical management of emergencies that are localised within their district.

The Hawke’s Bay CDEM Group is separate from these individual council units. It does not replace them. Its role is to coordinate across the region, provide surge capacity, manage regional-level planning and assurance and step in only when events exceed local capacity or affect multiple councils at once.

Where confusion creeps in is when people assume “civil defence” lives only at the regional level. It doesn’t – and it was never intended to.

The history goes back to 2014.  There was a change in the way Civil Defence was structured in New Zealand when it was restructured towards a more centralised model. Local volunteer-based units, often deeply embedded in small communities, were disbanded. Equipment was removed and a more professionalised regional group structure was introduced.

This was met with strong opposition at the time. I remember my local civil defence unit at Waimārama fighting hard to retain some independence over both management and infrastructure. As a community, we were poorly served by the change and lost critical resources for an isolated area like ours.

City and district councils retained responsibilities for local response, but over time the cultural centre of gravity shifted. The assumption grew – not through malice, but through practice – that civil defence sat primarily with the central group rather than being something councils actively held and communities participated in.

Cyclone Gabrielle showed us the cost of that drift.

Local councils no longer had the depth of on-the-ground capacity they once did. The regional group office, which was designed to coordinate rather than carry the full operational load, was overwhelmed. Communities experienced a vacuum where they expected certainty and delay where they needed decisions based in local knowledge.

The system didn’t just struggle – it exposed where responsibility had quietly almost disappeared.

After Gabrielle, there were reviews, inquiries and plenty of judgement. More importantly, there was broad agreement across councils that the system itself needed to change, structurally, not cosmetically.

The CDEM Joint Committee adopted a Transformation Strategy built around one clear principle: locally led, regionally supported. That has meant deliberately re-balancing the system.

The regional group has been refocused on coordination, planning, surge response and assurance. We have reduced staff levels in the regional office and at the same time funded approximately $160,000 back to each city and district council so they can employ their own Local Controllers and strengthen their emergency management teams.

This is about clarity of role, not duplication. Local councils must be able to respond locally. The regional group must be strong enough to support, coordinate and escalate when needed.

In practice, if Hastings floods, Hastings District Council takes both the operational and governance lead. They activate their emergency operations centre, manage communications, open welfare centres and work directly with Police, Fire and Emergency and community providers. That is their responsibility.

If the situation escalates beyond local capacity, Hastings can then call on the Hawke’s Bay CDEM Group to provide additional support, coordination or resources.

The same applies in Napier, Wairoa and Central Hawke’s Bay.

When an emergency becomes genuinely regional – affecting multiple councils at once, compounding risk and stretching systems – then the Group steps in to lead the response.

And where legal powers are required to evacuate people, restrict access or deploy major assets, the Regional Council Chair, on the advice of professional emergency managers, can declare a State of Emergency. This is not symbolic. It enables decisive action at precisely the point when delay carries the greatest risk.

We saw this last weekend when forecast coastal conditions had the potential to affect beach communities across Napier, Hastings and Central Hawke’s Bay simultaneously. A single regional declaration allowed one coordinated operational response, clearer communication for Police and emergency services and more people on the ground than three separate council responses would have achieved.

This week was family week at the Coroner’s Inquiry into Cyclone Gabrielle. The statements were deeply moving – raw, generous, heartbreaking. What the statements reinforced again was the critical importance of early and effective warnings.

Not better systems after the fact. Not heroics once water was already rising – although many showed extraordinary courage. But time – time to understand what was coming, to make decisions early and to leave before there was no safe way out.

Those voices are worth remembering when frustration surfaces about being asked to evacuate, or to spend a night away from home, or to respond to a warning that may, in the end, not eventuate. Ill-preparedness does not sit neatly with the individual. It ripples outward. It triggers middle-of-the-night rescues in dangerous conditions. It pulls scarce resources away from other people and other places. It puts emergency workers in harm’s way when margins are already thin. None of those consequences are abstract.

When I became Chair of the CDEM Joint Committee late last year, I asked a question: how do we know this will work? I’m interested in assurance, not optimism. Good intentions are not a guarantee.

And so in March, the committee commissioned a full independent assurance review of how well each council – and the regional group – is resourced, staffed, trained and meeting the service-level agreements we have all signed up to. This is not about blame. It is about evidence, transparency and accountability, because communities deserve more than reassurance. They deserve proof and – as the group holding the can when things go wrong – we need it too. The review results will come to the committee in June.

Civil defence is indeed a system – governed collaboratively by your elected leaders, who are accountable for making it work. But no system functions well if the people within it are disengaged.

It starts not with being “woke” in the pejorative sense, but awake – to the environment you live in, the warnings being issued, the risks we already know exist and the reality that preparedness is not an inconvenience.