Preparing for Recovery

Being forewarned is forearmed. With pre-planning comes preparation, and with preparation comes reduced risk. With reduced risk comes reduced harm/effect, and with reduced harm/effect comes reduced loss = less cost. By being aware of potential disasters in your area, and trying to mitigate them as much as possible, the overall cost to society and the community should be reduced.

Have local knowledge
Know the area where we live/work, and the possible hazards - what are they are and what are the issues associated with them - then how can we plan to mitigate the damage and have a recovery plan.
In other words understand all the known risks and potential new risks and plan how to lower their effects. Then have strategies in plan for if when situations occur, a clear set of guidelines that everyone knows and follows - hopefully!
Be prepared and ready to recovery.
Take responsibility for your own and family's future by having a plan, the tools to survive, insurance, and a positive can do attitude.

The community needs to take seriously the information they are given by experts through the many campaigns that happen, not just think it will never happen to me. They need to take responsibility for their own recovery, without expecting "someone else will help". Having good plans for their family / business etc and being able to look after yourself for a time will reduce the demands on those agencies that are tasked to respond, giving them greater ability to respond to the most severely affected first. Each person needs to take the time to understand the risks they could face in their communities and understand what to do about them.

I think in terms of recovery, people need to understand the time lags involved. Taking the Canterbury earthquakes as an example, yes there was insurance to repair the damaged homes, However, the amount of damaged property meant that labour supply could not meet demand, and therefore the time to repair was extended.

In some ways, we're seeing a similar disconnect with the COVID response. The time between a pandemic declared and the recovery phase is unknown - and in this case the community resilience is being worn down.

So, you're left with the triangle with each point being labelled time, task, person. Because the length of time is unknown, the recovery task cannot be fully planned, and therefore the people do not know/have enough information to recover.

And this is why COVID has been so hard - because the most basic part of the resilience and recovery - kanohi ti ke kanohi could not be put in place. It's much more difficult to pool resources, when individuals cannot come together. Leaving food on a doorstep may satisfy the physical hunger, but it doesn't help the mental hunger.

In the case of a natural disaster (or even a man-made twin tower type event), people can come together to support each other.

Having now been stuck in England because of the border closure, Google Duo and Facetime is not an adequate replacement for support from my whanau (or me to them).

I really hope that when the COVID response is fully reviewed, the mental distress of closing social networks long term is fully explored.

I also think COVID has highlighted that some things cannot be replaced or compensated through insurance. Yes, we can have insurance to replace a car, bicycle, property. Yes we can use the costing of behaviour to potentially influence behaviour. Coastal housing carrying a higher premium due to flooding and climate change may deter purchasers or it may not.

Health insurance has not really been effective for COVID because a) private providers in the main do not offer the highest level of care/the most expensive ie ICU is the difference between life and death and is only provided for in the public system b) most private providers are specialists in some form of physical disease or degeneration (such as colonoscopy or hip replacements) c) a respiratory type of illness - especially a novel variant is unlikely to appear on a policy.

So, in the case of recovery from COVID, border closure may well have kept the disease out, but it could be like excessively sanitising your home, on sending your child to school, they pick up every bug and have worse reactions to them.

My lesson from considering this course is reduce the risk, be ready for the risk, respond to the risk and recovery from the risk is much further advanced from natural disasters and even terrorist/war type events than it is for health events.

I note that the COVID self-isolation plan mirrors the Civil Defence checklist. But really how would an extended family in a three bedroom property in a Kainga Ora property in South Auckland, Taita, or anywhere else in New Zealand really put into place these isolation measures?

So if there is one one critical thing my community and the organisations I involved with do to be more ready for disaster recovery is to put those with the least at the forefront of any and all planning.

What one critical thing could your community or organisations do to be more ready for disaster recovery? Plan and prepare. Plan not just for responding but the recover - ensuring for instance in work places computers are backed up in case they are physically lost or you can access them but can the external hard drive/Cloud. I know of an organisation in CHCH that lost their computer and nothing of any of their work was backed up. Future proof the organisation who has codes. passwords etc incase the main person with them gets very sick, dies etc, plan how you will work after the emergency eg from home, office, in groups etc. Prepare be a good boy scout and be prepared, how secure is the office from things toppling in an earthquake, what's the plan post emergency on how you might operate, would you need to change how you do things eg provide services but maybe not in person for sometime due to accessing office, safety, or an opportunity to do something new or different,