Tom Mueller: 0:08

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management and we like to share stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. Marc Mullen, my esteemed co-host, is with me again today. Hey, mark.

Marc Mullen: 0:26

Hello Tom, Happy to be here with you.

Tom Mueller: 0:29

We are today. We're traveling down to the Southern Hemisphere, to Christchurch, new Zealand, to talk about earthquake response. Our guest today is Brendan Winder, who is a crisis manager in Christchurch, and he was there for well, for multiple earthquakes over time, but the one we're going to talk about was in February of 2011, which was a very large quake that we'll get into in just a moment. Give you some details about that. But, brendan, welcome to the podcast.

Brenden Winder: 1:05

Thank you very much, tom, and thank you.

Tom Mueller: 1:13

Mark, real pleasure to be here. Brendan, give us a quick thumbnail of your crisis experience and your background, kind of what led you to where you are today?

Brenden Winder: 1:19

Sure, yeah, like many in the industry, I started out in the military, I was in the Navy and then in 2005, joined the emergency management sector full-time as a sole charge emergency management officer in Queenstown, new Zealand. I spent quite a bit of time training with the crew here in Christchurch in Canterbury, new Zealand, and then the earthquake hit. The first one was 2010. And I came up to help with that. And then we had the big one, february 2011, and I've pretty much been here ever since in various recovery and response roles.

Tom Mueller: 1:55

Well, you've got really a unique experience it feels like to me anyway in terms of the scale of incidents that you've worked with in your career. I just want to touch base. I just want to give a few details about this 2011 quake so our audience has a good understanding of what we're talking about here. And this, the quake was a 6.3 magnitude and the some of the aftershocks that came through were 5.6. So, in addition to the big quake, you had a lot of smaller but still very large quakes shaking the town. It was a true tragedy in that 185 people were killed in collapsing buildings and slides and such so really a horrific incident. 8,000 properties ended up being purchased by the government and raised, so that's 8,000 homes, businesses that families could no longer occupy, or businesses as well. The scale of this is just sort of astounding. But, brendan, obviously New Zealand tends to be quake prone, so how prepared are you from emergency management perspective today to deal with these types of incidents now?

Brenden Winder: 3:20

So much better now than we were in 2010 and 11. And I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the people that passed in that event and the many other people that were affected by it also. So you know, one of our responsibilities in emergency management is to learn from these circumstances. So, to answer your question, we're much better prepared now than we were then. We learned some very tough lessons and that, I think, is one of the key parts of our job.

Tom Mueller: 3:53

Can you just briefly paint a picture for our audience of what you saw? You know, you first responded to this and then we'll kind of talk about the scale of the response and that. But you know, paint us that picture, this, and then we'll kind of talk about the scale of the response and that. But you know, paint us that picture. What did you see?

Brenden Winder: 4:10

So I was not in Christchurch for the big event in February. I was living in Queensland at the time. The media coverage was immediate and I flew up the following day to help out. But what I saw actually on the way in from the airport the airport's to the west of Christchurch what I saw on the way in was very little damage. Surprisingly, and I was wondering on the way in was mostly suburban single-story stick-frame buildings that respond very well to earthquakes, multi-story high-rise buildings. And it became apparent that the scale of the event and severity hadn't been overblown at all. It just affected different buildings in different ways and as I got towards the Central Business District I was very clear there that the scale of the event was very significant and it was going to have a big impact on a lot of people.

Marc Mullen: 5:23

You were going there at the time from a different location. When you got to the center Emergency Operations Center was everybody able to get there, or were you running a skeleton crew, or were you able to have all the resources you needed from the start?

Brenden Winder: 5:41

So interestingly because I arrived the following day, some immediate actions had been taken and I think they saved a lot of lives. Fences were erected around the city, the central business district of christchurch. They call it the four avenues, these four big sort of roads here in the city that form a sort of ring road around the city. So it's about 11 kilometers, so six or seven miles in usb. So a six or seven mile fence was put up around the city and immediately everyone inside that area was evacuated. So there was a lot of activity, lots of displaced business people, lots of displaced residents, the homeless community, anyone who normally spent time in that space had been removed, and a number of people like me were coming in to help out. So it was a very busy, very chaotic, very tense time With everyone. At that time everyone kind of understood why it was happening, so there was real support for the decisions that had been made, but it was still clearly a very chaotic, busy and intense time.

Tom Mueller: 6:49

Given the training that you've had in this space and the experience, were you able to set priorities and get things moving very quickly? Or was there that sort of early fog of war and chaos in those first several days? I think we've learned a lot since then. So the fog of war and chaos in those first several days.

Brenden Winder: 7:06

I think we've learned a lot since then. So the fog of war, which absolutely was in place then, would be mitigated to an extent now, but just given the scale of the event, it was very hard to have any degree of situational awareness across the entire extent of the scale of the emergency. So, yes, fog of war, but also, yes, priorities. And if you ever find yourself in the fog of war, one of your first priorities must be is to gain situational awareness. So when you don't know what's happening, you do know that you need to know what's happening. So one of the first priorities you can make, let's find out who's affected, what's affected, where is affected, and you need to start deploying resources to find out that information quickly. So even when there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty, there can still be some simple priorities that move you towards your end game, which is to find out what's going on.

Tom Mueller: 8:07

You know you were run out of police officers very quickly for doing that type of assessment. Did you involve others military and others to help scale up that team?

Brenden Winder: 8:19

Yeah, so there was. Interestingly, we didn't run out of police officers. We had access to a whole lot of Australian cops and they came over to New Zealand very quickly within days. We also had a large military exercise going on just serendipity, really just good luck. So they were quickly pivoted into supporting a number of activities. There was a large ship in town in Littleton, our nearest port, a warship in town from the Royal New Zealand Navy and, again just good luck, they were doing command change. They had two sets of command team on board at the same time, so they were doubly resourced just through circumstance same time. So they were doubly resourced just through circumstance.

Brenden Winder: 9:10

So the the navy set up in littleton uh was to look after the assailants first of all, but then they quickly deployed into littleton and provided a whole lot of relief and support uh to that suburb as well. And the army military um in christchurch quickly configured themselves to support there too. So we had lots of support from police, australian police, singaporean police and New Zealand police, but then also New Zealand military as well. So there was lots of uniforms around and New Zealand's are pretty good at respecting the military here. So military and uniform police personnel on the ground was quite reassuring and comforting, so that was a real benefit and a real plus. Personnel on the ground was quite reassuring and comforting, so that was a real benefit and a real plus early on in response.

Marc Mullen: 9:49

So, when we talk about staffing and maybe just for perspective, how long were your shifts, how long per day did you work and how many days were you there? Did?

Brenden Winder: 10:03

you work and how many days were you there? So I was a part of the initials planning set up in our emergency operation center. So in New Zealand it comes in three levels. There's the national emergency management agency, broadly equivalent to FEMA. Then we have a regional emergency management group, which would be for us in Christchurch. Our regional group is Canterbury, so it's a provincial set up. And then we have the local set up too, which is where I am now at Christchurch City.

Brenden Winder: 10:34

At the time I was working for the national agency. Largely that system there should operate in their own geolocations, but in this circumstance it was all collapsed into one emergency operations centre which, just through a bit of bad luck, actually the locations here in Christchurch were in the process of being swapped over. So we ended up after a couple of changes. We ended up operating out of our art gallery, which thankfully is a big modern building, and we had hundreds and I don't know the exact number, but it was easily three or four or 500 people in there operating 24-7. And that process carried on for I suspect I don't know the exact time, but it was probably six weeks at 24-7. And then we carried through all the way from February to April the 18th of that year where we transitioned into a recovery setup, with hundreds more people in that setup as well. So heavily resourced, lots of people, lots of interest, lots of media and lots of activity.

Tom Mueller: 11:41

Well, I want to talk to you in just a moment about communications aspects of this. But the you know the challenges of dealing with displaced population and I don't know if you can tell us, kind of how many people were actually displaced and moved into evacuation shelters, and then, of course, all the logistics for providing for those people. How did that whole process play out?

Brenden Winder: 12:07

Yeah, so at the time it was relatively organic. But thankfully the evacuation process in the CBD meant it was about somewhere in the magnitude of 5,000 people who could no longer go back to their house. They just could not do that. It was unsafe to do so. Plus, there was a whole group of people whose houses were affected, mainly in the eastern part of the city, and that number is unknown because many of those houses were damaged but still broadly livable. So some people chose to move out.

Brenden Winder: 12:39

Some people had to move out and figuring out the numbers around that is difficult because for various reasons, but mainly in the welfare centres we were trying to transition the people through those and to be looked after with friends and family.

Brenden Winder: 12:55

There was also a whole lot of commercial accommodation options used and in New Zealand our indigenous population, of which I'm a part, the Maori population, they have what are called marae and in a marae that's a large meeting house they designed to accommodate lots of people for periods of time, for funerals, for weddings, for other important functions, and the Marae in Christchurch and around Christchurch all stood up very quickly, supported the entire community, not just their own indigenous community, and they provided a lot of welfare and evacuation resources as well, community, and they provided a lot of welfare and evacuation resources as well. So there was an organic model, there was the organized model and a whole lot of other activities on the side of that too. Because of the scale of it, it was very hard to get exact numbers, but several thousand people over several months, and in fact there's still people now that are battling to get back into their homes.

Tom Mueller: 13:52

Talk to us a little bit, if you can Brendan, about the communications aspects of it. You know my picture of this is that you've got significant infrastructure damage, and so you know what were the main lines of communications that you had available then to reach the affected population and how successful were those.

Brenden Winder: 14:15

So, yeah, there was significant infrastructure damage Now. So we're talking 2011 now. Things have changed since then much more misinformation, disinformation, malinformation now in that ecosystem, but at the time it was still pretty well behaved. So the cell phone towers New Zealand still has a mixture, or had a mixture then, of landlines in the house and many people had cell phones most of them, nearly everyone but at the time the cell phone towers went down because of overuse. So they didn't go down because they had lost power or disconnected from the network. They were overwhelmed in terms of volume of calls. So what we've figured out since then is it's far better to text, send a short message system through to someone and then, when the system allows, it'll spit it through and you can pick it up rather than trying to call. So the voice calling cell phone network went down.

Brenden Winder: 15:12

Landlines were impacted in some areas because earthquakes moved the land and the landlines mostly copper wires laid underground were impacted. So that was a challenge. But the radio networks worked very well. The TV broadcasting networks worked very well, so there was still enough channels and opportunities to get the messages out there. So I think we were lucky in that regard, where most of our infrastructure was very resilient. The electricity infrastructure had been strengthened. Very recently the water network in the roads got beaten up. That happens in earthquakes, of course, but in terms of communications getting broadcast messages out to large groups of people, facebook and other platforms we're still available to. So we can get comms out to the community, to most of the community, pretty quickly.

Tom Mueller: 16:02

Just lead us through your plan today If you had a major incident like this. Are you much more geared toward social media communications and that? How might it be different?

Brenden Winder: 16:18

Yeah, so we run a PACE plan now and I'm sure that will be familiar to many of your listeners. We have primary, alternate, contingency and emergency communications mechanisms. So we have a very clear PACE plan that we would use and it's largely dependent on availability and broadcast scale. So what can we use and who will it get to? We take a very much multi-channel approach so we will put messages on all the available broadcast channels to try and connect with people that way, also really aware that some people don't necessarily trust the government. So we'll be trying to put information in front of leaders and influencers in their communities so they can amplify those messages and hopefully it'll get to those people who have less trust in government.

Brenden Winder: 17:09

But there's a lot of low tech methods we use too. So word of mouth bulletins, we'll go door to door. If we need to, we'll post things in appropriate places and notice boards etc. So very much a multi-channel. Lots of people working in lots of spaces broadcasting critical messages. Regularly as well. We get how important comms is. It's hugely influential on the initial actions in an event when comms is done right.

Marc Mullen: 17:43

So how did again, so many of you were there, so many of you were affected, how did you handle the emotional load of looking around and seeing your people and your city impacted by this when you're in the middle of trying to respond?

Brenden Winder: 17:59

I think we'd do it differently if we did it again. The approach we took at the time was just a buddy bite down on your mouth guard and keep on boxing. You know, it was kind of the old-fashioned approach just keep going and keep going and keep going until you fall over and you get up and do it all again and, uh, we saw some people, um, you know not respond to that. Well, in the long term, the more modern, contemporary approach would be much more about managing fatigue and managing trauma, managing the emotional response. We're far more sophisticated now and better prepared and more aware of the toll it takes on the community, but also the first responders as well. Myself and many of my colleagues reflect on those times as being hugely impactful, and not always positively, on our emotional and mental health.

Marc Mullen: 18:54

Did some of that have a long tail, In other words, after response and after recovery? I'm guessing that a lot of people kind of carried some of that stress with them as they were demobilized and sent back home. Was there any effort at monitoring or helping them with those high stress resolutions?

Brenden Winder: 19:17

Yeah, absolutely, and for many people that stress hasn't gone away. So the long tail of recovery for us. We think it'll be at least generational these kids in Christchurch that have had five national states of emergency in the first 15 years of their life and that introduces trauma into their life where no one wants their kids to go through it. Some kids here have done it multiple occasions. So plenty of adults here and kids here with experience of that. Demobilising from the response and going home is a part of it. There's people here with trauma 15 years later, and we need to acknowledge that and do it better next time. I would say, though, there was quite a lot of effort and that's probably understanding it a really significant effort put in towards managing mental health and stress through the agencies here in New Zealand. So a lot of time and effort was invested, and I think in the future we'd do at least that again.

Tom Mueller: 20:22

Talk to us a little bit about training today, brendan. Has your training regimen changed as a result of all these experiences, and what do you do to keep people honed and ready for a major incident now?

Brenden Winder: 20:49

think training is a part of a continuum. So for us, um, we start um at the learning and awareness stage, so understanding the hazards and the impacts of it, so learning about it, and then, uh, we uh go through that whole process to understand it, and then there's training to respond to it, then exercising that and then delivering it as well. So the view we've taken is we need to be fit to respond and that's fit in a sort of emotional, physiological sense, mental as well. So that's a mixture of skill set but also mindset, skillset but also mindset. And when we're training, the analogy that we use is we need to be going, for we need to be exercising often to get ourselves fit.

Brenden Winder: 21:34

So you wouldn't train for a marathon by going for one 10 hour run once a year. You'd train for a marathon by running two or three times a week and building your skills up over time. So we take an approach where we now train with much greater frequency and higher intensity and we give ourselves way more scope too. So rather than just saying, in an earthquake, buildings fall over, how do you deal with the buildings? We are training specifically in comms, specifically in psychological first aid, specifically around evacuations, specifically in psychological first aid, specifically around evacuations, specifically around shelter in place, specifically around how do we manage logistics and intelligence and planning, et cetera. So we have higher frequency with more detail and more intensity.

Marc Mullen: 22:21

That's how you train responders, or is that to focus on the entire population?

Brenden Winder: 22:25

So that's the responders. Yeah, we need to be careful on the entire population. So that's the responders. Uh, yeah, we need to be careful with the um, you know, the civilian population, the community, we don't. We need to balance having an understanding of the risk but also allowing them to lead their life. We can re-traumatize people by making them or, you know, asking them to do more readiness activities, um, but we have to find that balance. If we don't give them enough preparation activities, then their skill fade and knowledge fade and they begin to sort of reduce their interest in the hazard. But if we do too much, it goes the other way. So we've got to try and find that sweet spot where we can do just enough, and there's a real challenge in that.

Marc Mullen: 23:05

I'm a survivor of the great orcas island earthquake of 2025. It was two nights ago. We were awakened in our bed by our earthquake alarms at 205 tom. It's the classic 2 am call you get. It reminded me again of just how befuddled you can be in the middle of the night when you're jarred awake by an alarm and you're trying to figure out what exactly you should do at that moment. And so you know it's interesting we're having this call today because I just realized it's not like you can say there, I have shoes by the bed.

Marc Mullen: 23:37

You've got to figure out what it is really like when you're waking in the middle of the night and you have to make decisions. So that's why I asked that it sounds like there's a balance, but somewhere there individuals have to know what to do. First. It was a real reminder to me again you think you can do something, you think you're ready, you think you'll think coherently. And then the next morning we were looking and say, why is the shower curtain open? And we realized that we'd run to decide if we should jump in the bathtub.

Brenden Winder: 24:08

One of the activities I asked my team to do is no notice exercises, so we don't know where it's happening or when it's happening. We can't assume we're going to be sitting at our desk with all our tools and resources available to us when the event happens. So to your comment earlier, mark atm are you ready? Are you prepared? Can you get in? Can you get to where you need to be with the people you need, with the tools you need to make the decisions you need? When you're literally pulling yourself out of bed looking at your wife and kids and figuring out what can happen in your house, it's, um, we need to be ready for everything all the time, and that could be tough lifestyle to to live through because you're just always on and there's always a stress about that.

Tom Mueller: 24:50

But you know if you're getting called out well we try and balance that.

Brenden Winder: 24:54

Uh, we try and balance it, tom. So so we have duty people and we have a um it's called the cooper color code and in there there's um colors that relate to different levels of alertness, colors that relate to different levels of alertness, and what I encourage our guys to do is occasionally you know, weekends and holidays is to go off completely. Just shut it all right down. Give your body a chance to recharge and reset in your mind, because if you stay too heightened for too long, it ends up being counterproductive. So we want to go in and out of those phases of alertness and we want the team to be doing it at different times so we can have coverage but also rest and respite as well. You can't sprint for two hours. That's just not possible. So we need to have people rested so we can sprint them when we need them.

Tom Mueller: 25:40

Recovery was a huge challenge in response to the earthquake situations there. Brendan, and I know you've been thinking about the Americans in Los Angeles who've been dealing with the Pacific Palisades wildfires which destroyed oh, I think it was 11,000 structures recently, as you think about your experience and then what's happening in Los Angeles now with Pacific Palisades, what's your advice for the people of Los Angeles today?

Brenden Winder: 26:12

Yeah, look. First of all I just say to them it's a tough event and the fire will be a big challenge, but the recovery might be a bigger challenge and there needs to be a really honest conversation about that. The insurance complications will be just beginning. The litigation will be beginning. The leadership in the city needs to be coherent and committed and organized and have any disputes that it may have behind closed doors, because the community will be looking for leadership.

Brenden Winder: 26:42

The scale of the event will mean that it's going to shift the construction and demolition market in that part of the state. So having people in there that understand the market forces at play, the volume and velocity of information moving around will be overwhelming. For many people feed and just the sheer number, the sheer amount of what you need to know who to talk to when, about what will be it'll be overwhelming and for many people they'll need assistance in navigating through that. The time it'll take will seem horribly longer than it should be. But I guess the final bit I just want to say well, not the final bit, but I just want to sort of tag it on the end is we've had a large-scale event here in christchurch and it's traumatic and it's tough and it's expensive and all those things.

Brenden Winder: 27:33

But, man, we've got a good city. Now. You know, after you go through all that and you get that, um, you go through the insurance, you go through the trauma and you go through all the response, the recovery dividend in christchurch here, with stadiums and arenas and sports fields and the quality of the buildings in our CBD. We're now really modern, really forward looking, really clean, really green, really well organized, really well led. But you know we had to go through a lot to get here and I think the people in LA, if they can hold on to that hope that the future will be brighter, they'll come out the other side of it. If they can hold on to that hope, it'll make some of those tough days through to recovery maybe slightly less tough.

Marc Mullen: 28:15

Realism about what you have to go through now, but also realism about what will come out at the very end, sort of that balanced hope.

Brenden Winder: 28:23

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there is some tough days ahead, but there's also some brighter days ahead too, and if you can deal with one and focus on the other, you'll get through it.

Tom Mueller: 28:34

Brendan, one personal question for you from my perspective, because my wife and I visited Christ Church in 2017, and just a family vacation and we noticed in the Central Business District there are lots of containers the shipping containers stacked up alongside buildings there and it looked like they were there keeping the structures up or what was. Can you tell me what the theory was or what was happening with all those boxes?

Brenden Winder: 29:08

Yeah, so your instincts are bang on, tom. Those shipping containers which are stacked the bottom one is typically filled up with gravel or some other aggregate to make it nice and heavy. Then it's mechanically connected and they have two or three more on top of it and the idea is that allows the traffic to move past it safely, because those big box structures are never going to move, but those shipping containers then allow work to go on behind it. So typically what's happened is the building behind it has a facade which is not safe for the public to be moving past. So the shipping containers protect the public from the facade to be moving past. So the shipping containers protect the public from the facade and the shipping containers also allow work to go on behind the facade so that that can be repaired or demolished or made safe or whatever needs to happen in behind it to allow some of the heritage aspects of the city to be retained as well.

Brenden Winder: 29:59

So you might have also noticed while you're here too, we use a number of shipping containers to make a retail mall in the CBD, because that could be done very quickly, and that's happened in a few places on a smaller scale around the world. We had a big container mall here in Christchurch. There was dozens of them and it was so popular that it became a cruise ship sort of tourism attraction. And it became in fact so popular when the time came to remove them people were saying actually leave them there. So a really good sign that recovery is going well is when the temporary measures become so popular and so well used that people want to hold on to them. They've gone now and we're back into a normal retail environment, but those shipping containers were a really useful part of our early recovery arrangements.

Tom Mueller: 30:41

Fascinating. I remember seeing a number of businesses operating out of containers while we were there, mostly small coffee shops or something small retail like that, but it was very sort of creative way to get things back open quickly. Brandon, anything else you wanted to mention as part of this conversation with us today?

Brenden Winder: 31:02

Yeah, probably the final thing for me is, just as a responder, we get reminded, but it's very easy to lose sight of. It is these big emergency responses aren't about buildings, they aren't about infrastructure, they aren't about power and water, they're about people, and keeping the community at the centre of response is professionally the right thing to do, but ethically and morally the right thing to do as well. And one thing the team and I have done here in Christchurch is we've created a persona, and it sounds a little bit silly but it's been very effective for us. We have designed a person in our team. They're made up, but they have a life and they have a name and they have friends and they have a job and they have a seat at our table.

Brenden Winder: 31:46

So when we're sitting down and doing our emergency management work, we reference this person who personifies the community and kind of check in to make sure that the decisions that we're making make sense and we check do they really benefit this person or is this decision serving the institution or is it serving the community? And if it's serving the institution or is it serving the community and if it's serving the institution, we'll have another look at it to say, actually, is this the right? Is this the right idea? Because if it's not serving the community, it's probably not the right decision in the long run. So that's a little tip and trick that we use to do that. Um, I know other police agencies and organizations have the the empty chair, which is kind of also a similar sort of concept. We have an empty chair at the table to signify the community, because they have to and must be at the center of response. And if we can all do that, I think all our responses will be a little bit better.

Tom Mueller: 32:42

Gentlemen, I think we'll stop there. It's been a terrific conversation. Brendan, Thank you very much for taking a little bit of time to share your experiences with us and with our audience. Thanks also for your wishes for the folks of Los Angeles and your advice and counsel to them on what's coming and what to expect going forward.

Brenden Winder: 33:02

No problem. Thank you, mark. Thank you, tom, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

Tom Mueller: 33:06

And that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. Thanks for joining us. If you like what you're hearing, please like and subscribe to the podcast and also tell your friends about us as well, and we'll see you again soon.

Marc Mullen: 33:25

Thank you.