The way authorities dealt with Auckland’s extreme weather on Friday illustrated how hit-and-miss our civil defence emergency system is. Although he finally announced a state of emergency at 10:17pm, there’s a strong consensus that this should have come many hours earlier. Brown has since explained that he left this issue to the Auckland Emergency Management team, which has the official role of advising on this. Auckland Emergency Management says that they started to consider a state of emergency at about 5pm on Friday, and decided against one at 6pm. Ardern, a veteran of many crisis press briefings, never lost control of a press conference.

Source: Stuff January 30, 2023 12:47 UTC