Dear Fire and Emergency New Zealand,

Both the Port Hills (Feb 2017) and Tasman (Feb 2019) fires independent reviews included a flawed recommendation that FENZ migrate from NZ’s agreed standard for incident management CIMS to the Australian AIIMS system

The last FENZ published update (Jan 2019) fof the Recommendations and associated Actions Items arising out of the Port Hills Fire Operation Review reversed the initial acceptance of these recommendations and advised that:

“In December 2018, it was decided that the Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS) will remain the multi-agency emergency management system for New Zealand. This decision will enable us to complete the outstanding 15 actions in the Port Hills Action Plan, which were on hold or delayed pending this decision. We will continue to be engaged in the inter-agency work updating CIMS to version three. Fire and Emergency will now identify the most appropriate Incident Command System (ICS) for the work we undertake. This programme of work will include:
• Review, update, develop and implement the ICS changes for Fire and Emergency personnel
• Map out how we remain interoperable in multi-agency incidents, plug into CIMS and the CIMS incident levels”.

Under the provisions of the Official Information Act I request the following information:

1. Which “Incident Command System” FENZ identified and has now implemented as advised in the Jan 2019 update to the Port Hills Action Plan as set out above?

2. A copy of the “Map” and other supporting documentation as advised in the Jan 2019 Update that now sets out how FENZ “remains inter-operable with multi-agency incidents, plugs into CIMS and the CIMS incident levels”.

Alan Thompson
Lower Hutt