Weathering it together: Planning for when things get wild!
A diverse and enthusiastic group met at the North East Valley Bowling Club on 25 September for the Valley Hazards and Emergency Preparedness Hui as part of Valley Fest to learn about the hazards we face in the Valley and what we can do to get through together if disaster strikes.
Jean-Luc Payan, Natural Hazards Manager at Otago Regional Council told us about Lindsay Creek and what might happen during heavy rainfall. Chris Brooker from the Otago Civil Defence Emergency Management Group presented on emergencies we might face – earthquakes, flooding, space weather! – and how it is super useful if we are able to look after ourselves as a community as much as we can when these things happen. Steve King from the New Zealand Red Cross showed us how easy it is to make a household plan and had dinky little water-resistant grab bags to take, for copies of our important documents in case we need to evacuate.
The evening was a good reminder that Civil Defence Emergency Management is not some group of other people coming to help you, but rather a way of doing things before, during and after an emergency. If there’s a big emergency, council staff and emergency services will be focussing their efforts on the worst affected areas. Hopefully that won’t be us, so we need to be civil defenders for each other while they are attending to people worse off.
To do this we’re starting a new group to bring together people who are passionate about our communities and emergency resilience. If you’re keen to share your skills and ideas to build on our readiness and resilience here in the Valley, we’d love to have you on board! We’ll be putting our heads together to come up with options for supporting our own Valley communities in an emergency, so that people can:
get together to find out essential information,
share skills and resources,
ask for and offer help,
register themselves as safe and leave messages for others, and
support each other over a cuppa.
We’ll start meeting bi-monthly to co-create a resilience and readiness plan for the Valley. Some of the suggestions from the September hui included learning about:
setting up a community-led hub
different hazards specific to our location and practical things we can do about them,
effective sandbagging practice (hopefully with pillows rather than actual sandbags?)
how to use a fire extinguisher before you actually need to
that old favourite - playing with VHF radios.
You can find more info on community resilience at https://www.otagocdem.govt.nz/get-your-community-ready.
We’re planning to have our first group get together from 7-8pm over a cuppa on Monday 17 November 2025 at the Valley Project! Everyone is welcome, you can be involved as much or as little as you want. If you’re a keen bean, contact Claire at the Valley Project to register your interest: community@northeastvalley.org or just pop by the office.
