Following the Tairāwhiti flood event in March 2022, which revealed coordination challenges due to a lack of situational awareness, the Tairawhiti Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) team initiated an innovative project to improve situational awareness and set up a common operating picture platform used for civil defence emergencies. Prior to this, only manual methods such as emails, excel spreadsheets, whiteboards, and physical maps were relied upon to try and keep track of events. This was an inefficient method to collate and share information during significant natural disaster events and emergencies.
Developed in the midst of a ten day flood event in Tairawhiti, the Common Operating Picture (COP) provided a digital platform that could seamlessly integrate real-time data and geospatial mapping to enable situation awareness, data products and access to decision making tools which greatly improve response activities. Through collaborative efforts and by leveraging existing relationships and expertise, Tairāwhiti CDEM created an advanced COP, enabling prompt responses and well-informed decision-making processes.
The success of the Common Operating Picture given the manner is collated and presented has gained widespread national interest and recognition given the functionality the platform has. This has provided a significant improvement for Tairawhiti emergency management to effective monitor, plan and develop response plans for emergency events. The platform has been subjected to ongoing development and linking of data layers and as such has sparked interest national given technology and data have been harnessed to transform the way emergencies are now managed in Tairawhiti.
