The terms of reference for a review into the Cyclone Gabrielle response of the Hawke’s Bay Civil Defence Management (HBCDEM) Group should be confirmed in a month’s time.

The review was mooted in mid-March, and members of the HBCDEM Joint Committee - which includes the province’s mayors and Hawke’s Bay Regional Council chair Hinewai Ormsby - discussed draft terms of reference at a meeting on April 28.

At that meeting, Hastings mayor Sandra Hazlehurst said the process was already taking too long and the community needed answers.

The Joint Committee hasn’t met since April 28 and won’t again until June 26.

 “Our expectation is that the independent review project – including terms of reference, a review framework and stakeholder engagement plan - will be signed-off for implementation at the meeting of the HBCDEM Group Joint Committee on 26 June,” chair of the HBCDEM coordinating executive group Doug Tate said.

“Work is currently being undertaken in the background on existing workstreams to support this process.’’

The themes of the April 28 meeting, which can be viewed on Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s Facebook page, were lessons and recovery.

Hazlehurst, in particular, argued the community needed to be heard and the trauma experienced during Cyclone Gabrielle acknowledged before lessons and recovery could come into play.

To that end, Hazlehurst has set up a Regional Affected Communities Panel, whose members have been attending public meetings and gathering feedback.

Despite that mechanism for interaction between the community and Hastings District Council, Hazlehurst said she was “really concerned” the Joint Committee would not have anything substantive to tell “our community until late in the year”.

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“We just need to get on with it,” Hazlehurst said.

The draft terms of reference were drawn up by consultancy firm Simplexity.

In introducing one of the terms of reference’s authors, Melinda Meads, HBCDEM Group controller Ian Macdonald told the April 28 Joint Committee meeting that the review “has to be a learning system”.

Hawke's Bay Civil Defence Emergency Group controller Ian Macdonald. Photo / NZME

Macdonald said any review into HBCDEM’s cyclone response on February 13 and 14 had to be “about continuous improvement of the system, not apportioning blame. I think the tone of the review actually needs to reflect that”.

It is still unclear just how the review will be conducted or compiled.

Councils are undertaking individual reviews of their own operations which will likely feed into the regional response review. On top of that, there is an expectation within the Joint Committee that the National Emergency Management Agency might undertake a review as well.

As Central Hawke’s Bay mayor Alex Walker noted, that’s a lot of reviews, a lot of which could potentially be bogged in terminology and procedure that overlooks what communities went through.

“As a region, we don’t have a clear set of information that tells a clear narrative and chain of events of what happened in the 24 hours before and 48 hours after [the cyclone] to allow us to understand how to review whether we did coordinate in the way we needed to,” Walker said.