Perspective with Jack Tame: Will the Mt Maunganui disaster become a watershed moment?

As the human tragedy at Mt Maunganui continues, the timeline around warnings and what authorities knew and when they knew it is becoming clearer.

Fire and Emergency has confirmed it received a 111 call about landslides on the Mount before 6 o’clock on Thursday morning. As you would expect, it has a robust record-keeping system, which records that call as being at 5.48am.

The slips at that time did not affect life or property, and so three minutes later at 5.51am, Fire and Emergency says it notified Tauranga Council as the landowner responsible.

But here’s where it gets tricky. Tauranga City Council’s CEO initially said there was no record of the call at the council’s end. Then he was corrected - and that the council did actually receive that call.

But given all of the staff who were working and the various calls they were receiving as they responded to weather problems that morning, it’s going to take a bit of time and the independent review to work out the timeline at the council’s end.

Personally, I had no idea until this week that landslides kill more people in New Zealand than any other natural disaster. But as the changing climate makes these big weather events much more common, the question of liability is becoming more prescient than ever.

In addition to responding to the myriad problems that extreme weather might cause, in addition to modelling for flooding and high winds, councils and landowners need to have a system for assessing landslide risk in different areas and responding in real time as conditions dictate.

And one of the critical questions in the independent review will be whether receiving that call from Fire and Emergency about a slip on the Mount would have been enough for the council to evacuate the campground.

Did they have an adequate, real time, extreme weather risk management system? Should staff have had to wait for a landslip to be reported? Or should heavy rain have been enough to get people out?

The question of liability looms over everything in this tragedy. And it’s my hunch that many councils and landowners around the country will be looking at the terrible events at Mt Maunganui and realising their own systems for assessing real time landslide risk are woefully inadequate.

Tauranga Council hopes to have the terms of reference and more detail about the independent review confirmed later this week. But just as Pike River was a catalyst for huge health and safety law reforms, the Mt Maunganui disaster is fast shaping up as a watershed moment for property owners and councils around the country.

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