When events and incidents impact the transport system, we need to ensure that the wellbeing of affected people is the highest priority.
Maintaining robust readiness arrangements for response and recovery, to ensure a coordinated approach to restore services, is essential to help mitigate the consequences on the community that our transport system serves.
New Zealanders are affected by events and incidents on our transport system every day. In most cases these are managed effectively through our Transport Operation Centres’ (TOCs) day-to-day activity.
Occasionally events and incidents require an exceptional level of capability and support to effectively manage and coordinate the appropriate response and recovery activities. Often such events and incidents need a seamless, coordinated response from more than one agency.
Examples of the types of incidents that have required this type of response include:
- Cyclone Gabrielle - February 2023
- North Island Severe Weather - January 2023
- Christchurch mosque shootings - March 2019
- Chemical truck roll on SH1 at Pukerua Bay - Labour weekend 2018
- Port Hill fires - February 2017 and February 2024
- Kaikōura earthquake sequence - November 2016.
As a lifeline utility, NZTA plays a significant role during the response and recovery stages of many emergencies and would be directly involved in minimising their consequences.
The emphasis of the requirements on NZTA through CDEM legislation is on ensuring continuity of operation on essential response and recovery activities. This is achieved by cooperative planning between other utilities, local government, emergency services, national government to develop effective readiness plans.
The approach NZTA takes to emergency management is underpinned by the expectations set out in the CDEM legislation and encompasses elements across the ‘4 Rs’ framework of resilience. Amongst other requirements, this includes:
- Identifying the service levels to aim for during and after an emergency, including service delivery expectations and capacity for the consequences of a range of disruptions.
- Identifying service restoration priorities as part of response and recovery.
- Establishing emergency procedures for communication.
Procedures and plans
When responding to disruptive events, NZTA enacts a suite of ready procedures and plans. These include:
- Highway Emergency Management Framework - Sets out NZTA’s approach to provide an effective coordinated response to incidents and emergencies that impact the transport system we are responsible for, which are beyond our business-as-usual capacity and capability.
- Highway National Emergency Response Plan - Provides actions to be taken to identify and respond to a beyond business-as-usual incident that requires the activation of a National Emergency Response Team (NERT) to coordinate NZTA’s response.
- Highway Regional Emergency Response Plan - Provides actions to be taken to identify and respond to a beyond business-as-usual incident that requires the activation of a Regional Emergency Response Team (RERT) to coordinate NZTA’s response.
- New Zealand roads incident management protocol - MoU between NZTA, NZ Police, FENZ, St John Ambulance and Wellington Free Ambulance to formalise the operational protocols for the effective and efficient management of incidents on New Zealand’s roads.
- Joint National Incident and Emergency Management Guidance - Guidance for establishing a future single national joint response team to enable a consistent and coordinated internal (business continuity) and external (lifeline utility) response to any risk or hazard where such an approach is required.
- NZTA Recovery Playbook - An approach to scalable and repeatable process to support and guide our recovery from emergency events on any physical asset and network operated and/or maintained by NZTA.
Further information on how NZTA considers emergency management can be found here:
Emergency works
