Capital of calm: Why has Wellington had so few states of emergency?

Tuesday, 21 April 2026

A man surveys flooding beneath a Petone overbridge, after a devastating storm on 20 December 1976 triggered one of the region’s few states of emergency.

On the numbers, you'd think Wellington was a serene safe-haven from wild weather and earthquakes.

When Porirua mayor Anita Baker declared a state of emergency on Monday, it was only the region’s third in the past 24 years. That’s despite the number of declarations nationally tripling in the past decade.

Before this week, the last state of emergency was in 2021, on Wellington’s south coast, to allow evacuations ahead of a forecast storm surge.

And before that, you had to go back almost two decades to 2003, when flooding in Paekākāriki sparked a five-day state of emergency to help with the clean-up.

That makes Wellington the region with the second-fewest days in a state of emergency since 2002, pipped only by the Chatham Islands.

So why is the wet, windy, shaky capital so under-represented?

Resilient, or reluctant?

When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Kaikōura just after midnight on November 14, 2016, its shockwaves rippled 150km across Cook Strait and through the capital.

About 40 buildings were damaged - some seriously - including the modern Statistics House and BNZ building on reclaimed port land. CBD streets were strung with cordons and strewn with glass. By any measure, the disaster was a big deal.

But sitting in the Thorndon disaster management office alongside emergency services staff, then-mayor Justin Lester decided (with advice) against declaring a state of emergency.

“While the earthquakes were very significant, they were fairly short run and we felt it could be locally managed, because it wasn’t clear what additional powers would provide us. Unless, of course, there was another major quake.”

For a state of emergency to be declared, an event has to fit the definition of “emergency” in the soon-to-be-replaced 2002 Civil Defence Emergency Management Act. That means it has to risk loss of life, injury, illness or distress, and needs a co-ordinated response. Lester used to carry around a checklist to help guide that decision.

And then there are three main reasons to make a declaration. The first is to allow more co-operation between different services and neighbouring areas.

The second is to unlock legal powers, which include requisitioning people or equipment - such as diggers, and mandatory evacuations, where the police can arrest people if they refuse to leave.

With about 20,000 people living downtown, mass evacuations seemed unwieldy, and inappropriate, Lester says. So instead they closed the CBD temporarily to non-residents, and managed the building inspections and clean-up locally.

While the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake caused significant damage to Wellington buildings, then-mayor Justin Lester opted not to declare a state of emergency.

“It was the right decision on a human level,” Lester says.

Where hindsight might disagree is in relation to the third reason for calling a state of emergency - access to extra resources and government help. It wasn’t until years later that the council realised how much invisible damage the quake had caused to underground infrastructure, Lester says.

“That might have helped perhaps unlock some more government funding.”

While it has been suggested that Wellington has historically been reluctant to declare states of emergency, in case it fuelled talk of moving the capital north, Lester says that was never a factor.

“It's not a question of vulnerability around the capital. But as soon as a state of emergency is declared, that does have significant and ongoing impacts…so that's always a consideration.

“We've learned through a pandemic that the country can continue to operate under changed settings, but it does put people under pressure - things like sports events, stadium events, conferences, travel impacts. It has a significant impact on people's lives.”

Lester thinks local government leaders have become more open to declaring emergencies.

Three houses in Stokes Valley were destroyed in the 1976 floods.

“Sentiment really changed around the threshold…In the past, it would be that we don’t declare a state of emergency unless it’s overwhelming, because we didn’t want to scare the local population.

“We decided, as a sector, that given the additional powers that you do have and support you can get from the government, it would be useful to use it more often.”

Short-lived and ultimately unnecessary

Fast forward five years from the Kaikōura quake, to 2021, and mayor Andy Foster was in the hot seat.

A southerly storm was forecast to hurl five-metre swells at Wellington’s Breaker Bay, so Foster had to decide whether to call a state of emergency to allow homes in the firing line to be evacuated.

“Staff basically said, look, we've got a concern…If this tracks as we expect it to track, then those waves are going to hit the south coast. If they do that, particularly at night, people will be trapped and there's a real risk to life.”

So a localised state of emergency was declared, and residents - some grumpy and sceptical - were evacuated. In the end, the storm shifted slightly, the damaging waves never eventuated, and there was some blow-back suggesting the declaration was overkill.

That’s always a risk with unpredictable weather, Foster says. But he doesn’t regret the decision.

“If you thought this might happen, and you end up with a catastrophe, with a lot of people being killed, you’d feel a lot worse not declaring the state of emergency, than declaring it.”

Justified, or just in case?

Cars and debris in an unidentified flooded Wellington street, after the 20 December 1976 storm.

Foster thinks the Wellington region’s low rate of emergency declarations relates to its topography, rather than a reluctance to make the call.

Other than the heavily buttressed Hutt River, the region has mostly creeks rather than full-blown rivers. So heavy rainfall tends to cause small-scale flooding and slips, which can be managed locally.

That’s also the view of current Wellington Civil Defence Emergency Management Group Response spokesperson, Dan Neely. While the region is regularly hit by quakes and weather bombs, they generally cause localised slips, surface flooding and limited power cuts, rather than widespread structural failure, he says.

Because a state of emergency over-rides normal legal safeguards, guidance from the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) explicitly says declarations should only be made when those powers are likely to be needed, not just because an event is serious or disruptive, Neely says.

Localised impacts can already be dealt with by local government, police and fire and emergency powers, emergency co-ordination centres, emergency mobile alerts, voluntary relocations and local transition periods, for recovery, he says.

“A state of emergency is intentionally a high‑threshold, last‑resort tool. Wellington like many other regions in New Zealand usually manages incidents using other powers and coordination mechanisms instead.

“Nema guidance is clear that a declaration should not be used ‘just in case’.”

Whether to declare a state of emergency will always be a balancing act. While Wairoa mayor Craig Little might dismiss them as “woke”, no-one wants to be Tauranga mayor Mahe Drysdale, fielding questions about why an area wasn’t evacuated, after six people have died.