NZ emergency services approach cyclone season with better comms

When Earth Sciences NZ (ESNZ) released its annual Southwest Pacific Tropical Cyclone Outlook recently, most New Zealanders probably missed it. But its message deserves attention. The forecast of five to nine tropical cyclones between November and April is a serious reminder for emergency services gearing up for the coming season.

For many of us, the experiences and images of Cyclone Gabrielle remain vivid. Responders wading through floodwaters, communities cut off, and power and communication networks under strain.

But those same emergency services will face this cyclone season with a vital new advantage: vastly improved cellular communications capability, thanks to the government’s $1.4 billion investment in the Public Safety Network Te Kupenga Marutau, delivered by Next Generation Critical Communications (NGCC).

Over the past two years, NGCC has delivered three new world-class, resilient and reliable national cellular communication services for our police, paramedics and firefighters. And we’ve done it on time and budget thanks to a globally acknowledged collaborative and technically innovative approach, working with emergency services and Spark and One NZ through their joint venture, Hourua. Comparable solutions in the majority of other countries, including Australia, remain in either the planning or delivery phases.

There are now nearly 25,000 frontline responders who, thanks to a Public Safety Network (PSN) SIM card in their phone or mobile device, can roam across both Spark and One NZ networks. Critically, this provides a backup network if one goes down and has delivered around 28,000 km² of additional coverage. The PSN Priority Service means when cell sites get congested or degraded like during a large emergency or gathering, emergency services’ cellular traffic is pushed to the ‘front of the queue’ for available coverage. The PSN Network Visibility Service provides ambulance, fire and police operational planners with a real-time status view of Spark and One NZ cellular coverage in any location. This means they can plan safe, effective operations, including to provide alternate communication technologies for responders if there is no cellular coverage.

The PSN Network Visibility Service was put to good use in the serious storms at the bottom of the South Island recently when Emergency Management Southland and the National Emergency Management Agency used it help to plan where and when they would send out operational and welfare teams, and to check whether they could rely on cellular coverage to access readings from their river-level monitoring devices.

Next up, NGCC is delivering a national network of small portable cell sites the emergency services will be able to quickly deploy to create ‘in-fill’ coverage when they need it.

These advances give the emergency services a significant operational boost at a time when they are increasingly using their phones and broadband-powered devices to do their jobs, including for things like coordinating with others involved in a response, sharing incident images and videos, checking forecasts, and sharing patient status information with hospitals. Good information at the right time means everything to the emergency services and their ability to make good decisions, ultimately resulting in support for the public.

NGCC is also developing and operating other hi-tech public safety communications services — with more in the pipeline. And we know the PSN Cellular Services will offer value to the wider web of organisations that work alongside the emergency services, getting ready for when the next Cyclone Gabrielle hits.

*Since 2020, Steve has been Director of Next Generation Critical Communications (NGCC), working alongside a high-performing team to develop a new Public Safety Network (PSN) for the emergency services. Steve comes from a 25-year career leading transformational change and growth in a range of disciplines and across sectors including financial services, local and central government, banking and energy. He’s at his best innovating, creating change and disrupting the current state to make things better for customers, staff and service users. A graduate of the New Zealand Leadership Programme, Steve is driven to empower and enable people in all their diversity to fulfil their potential by providing a vision, creating energy and helping to remove barriers. Mentoring others is a passion.

Top image credit: iStock.com/Lakeview_Images