Napier Mayor Wise reflects on recovery needs & issues

A week and a half after Cyclone Gabrielle ripped through Hawke’s Bay, I sat down with Napier Mayor Kirsten Wise for a bit of a stock take. She looked surprisingly fresh for someone who has barely stopped to take a breath.

While the city is still very much in ‘response’ mode and there are still many people reported missing who are yet to be located, thoughts are slowly beginning to turn to recovery.

I asked her to begin with general reflections on what’s been one of the most challenging times in the city’s history.

Thank you

“First and foremost, I want to say thank you to our community. Watching the community pull together, support each other and help those who have needed help, has been so heart-warming. I want to say thank you for being so patient. 

“Those first four days, and longer for many, when we had no telecommunications, no power and I was sitting in the emergency operation centre just feeling so incredibly frustrated and in despair really, that we couldn’t get the information out to our community to let them know what was happening.

“I think that was one of the most difficult times of my life I would say, knowing that our community of 67,000 people were in the dark with no means of communicating with loved ones and not knowing what was happening. It does raise some very big questions for us as a nation.”

In fact, a lot of challenging conversations would be on the cards in the coming weeks and months, she said.

Legal boundaries

Napier City Council was working closely with counterparts in Hastings to support those smaller communities, that while officially being part of Hastings, were in closer to proximity to Napier – Esk Valley, Eskdale, Rissington, Puketapu, Waiohiki – because the reality is that people in those communities identify more closely with Napier, she said.

“We will be working in partnership with Hastings … but their kids go to our schools, they use our council facilities, they do their shopping here. There is an expectation that we as Napier assist with their recovery and we will absolutely do that.”

Looking to the future, there might be a need to have conversations about how Hawke’s Bay is divided up, she said.

Core public services lost

Wise reflected on the fact that Napier was essentially an island for several days, completely cut off from its neighbours and the rest of the country. It was bad enough to lose power and communications, but Napier also had no hospital, no civil defence centre, we had no police station.

“When we lost those core public services the question was raised, ‘What happens if Napier is ever entirely cut off?’, and people scoffed and said ‘that will never happen’. Well, it has.”

Promises had been made about the level of support that would be provided for Napier’s health centre and police station, that had not been kept, she said.

This would need to be addressed. 

Wise felt confident that there was a willingness for those conversations to be had at the regional level, but there was a question mark over how willing central government would be prepared to have them.

Recovery from the bottom up a must

Wise was adamant that Napier does not want to be a repeat of what had happened in Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake, where central government came in and took over.

“We don’t want something done to us.”

“We have been putting together a proposal to put towards the cabinet paper that is being prepared at the moment. Stuart [Nash] has been a part of that. It’s very much based on the foundation of any task force and recovery group associated governance board being underpinned by locality boards. 

“Each individual council having their own governance group and their own resources to develop their own locality plan in terms of what recovery looks like for us. And those feeding up into this regional entity. But the decision making and prioritising is very much driven from bottom up.”

Napier’s recovery needs are very different from the rest of Hawke’s Bay, which is driven by the needs of primary produce sector, she said. Rather, Napier’s recovery was around tourism and hospitality and small to medium business. It was important that those needs were not lost in the wider recovery needs, she said.

Government relief

Wise said the council was very grateful for the allocation from central government of $250 million to help Waka Kotahi and local councils to assess and fix roads, and another $50 million to deliver interim emergency business and primary sector support. However, while this was a good start, it wasn’t going to be anywhere enough.”

“We’ve got roads all over the region and Tairawhiti [that need fixing], and $250 million is not going to go very far. The priority for us here in Napier is getting those access roads into the region fixed as quickly as possible.”

Napier MP Stuart Nash, who is also the Ministerial lead for Hawke’s Bay on the Central Government response and recovery from Cyclone Gabrielle, has said this was going to be one of the jobs that took priority, after fixing the stop banks.

“I was very reassured to hear that,” Wise said.

Wastewater treatment plant

A full picture of what is happening at the Awatoto wastewater treatment plant, damaged in the storm floods, is only just coming together. Because of that untreated sewage was being discharged into the ocean, Wise said.

“We certainly don’t want to be doing that any longer than we need to be. That’s going to be one of our number one priorities as we move into recovery, a plan around that.”

Crime and looting

Wise said it was hard to know exactly how much crime was taking place. Rumours and speculation, combined with a lack of actual crime reporting, because people had simply been unable to get through, had led to a muddy picture. 

“I think it’s somewhere in between what the police are seeing and what’s been blown up in the community. The important thing to acknowledge is that perception is 99% reality in people’s minds. If people feel unsafe that has to be acknowledged and addressed.”

Since extra police had been brought in along with the eagle helicopter, police had been able to capture and charge quite a few people, she said.

Mood of the city 

Wise says the mood is different for everyone. The experience of Cyclone Gabrielle had been incredibly variable – people who were only affected by loss of power and meat in the freezer defrosting – and those who had experienced the loss of homes, livelihoods and loved ones. For those people the recovery would be huge, she said.

“As a leader of this city I’m trying at the moment to think about how we deal with that. How do we wrap around all of them in the way that they need. That’s what we will be working on now as we move into recovery for our Napier community.”

Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.