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MikeB4:
frednz:
MikeB4:
hoping for a quiet day.
Yes, I can understand that, so here's hoping, at least the Government is saying that a Civil Defence overhaul is inevitable after all the tsunami confusion so this must be a step in the right direction!
There was complete confusion, for example, in Lower Hutt where the sirens went continuously for more than half an hour, but they were activated nearly 3 hours after the earthquake, which must surely have been too late?
So, before, during, and after the sirens had sounded, we tuned in to Newstalk ZB Wellington but there were no instructions about whether it was necessary to evacuate or not in north Lower Hutt. Some of the time while we were listening to Newstalk ZB, there were commercials, can you believe it, commercials at a time of so-called crisis! Was National Radio any better, at least there wouldn't have been commercials?
The sirens were sounding loudly many kilometres north of Petone Beach, say at least 10k north, yet people were jumping into their cars and clogging up the roads driving north (and up hills) to nowhere because they thought a tsunami might swallow up the whole of the Hutt Valley! So did the tsunami alert apply just to within 2 or 3k of the coast, or even up as far as 10k north of the coast?
And the tsunami alert apparently wasn't lifted until late Monday afternoon and some people were frightened to go back to their homes in Lower Hutt until this alert was lifted!
Incidentally, rest homes in the Wellington district don't seem to have been evacuated, even Rita Angus which is quite close to Lyall Bay!
So, I agree with the Government that a Civil Defence overhaul must surely be inevitable!
I don't think they did anything wrong in Lower Hutt. The Hutt Valley is a wide alluvial plain with a large river that has a wide estuary, there is also another wide stream. At the river mouth there is a fuel terminal and large petrol and oil storage tanks.
The valley has a gentle rise up most of it with high hills each side that will funnel and tsunami or surge. The river could take a surge quite a distance up cause the river to breach its banks.
Here is the tsunami map for Hutt.
Thanks very much Mike for this helpful information. I have had a look at the Lower Hutt tsunami evacuation zones on the above map and I acknowledge that Lower Hutt has the special features that you mention and, in particular the Hutt River which is red-zoned for about 1.8k on its passage northward up the valley (although the main river flow is from north to south to the sea).
The distance from the sea to the outer evacuation yellow zone is no more than a maximum of about 3km, so northern Lower Hutt suburbs such as Stokes Valley (15k north from the sea), Taita (11.2k north), Naenae (9.2k north) and Avalon (9.1k north) are well out of the tsunami zones. However, some of these suburbs could clearly hear the loud tsunami siren, which I think just meant that people should listen to their radios and get the latest advice available. I don't think it meant that everyone in these northern suburbs should immediately evacuate their homes (as some people thought). People who evacuated from the suburbs that are well out of the tsunami zones merely clogged up the roads and made it difficult for people who really did need to evacuate because they lived close to the sea.
I think it's really necessary that everyone should be aware of their tsunami evacuation zones and perhaps Civil Defence should send out maps to all households? Also, if there is a real need to evacuate, you would think that a few trucks with loudspeakers would be going around telling people to evacuate immediately. After all, this happens when the Council turns the water off, so it shouldn't be too hard to do this when there is a serious event going on!
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