Auckland Council's emergency management system was found unprepared. That was the findings of the flood response report in the wake of that. Now, more than three months on, in faced with yet another severe weather event, has the council learned from its mistakes? Auckland Central MP Chloe Swalburick joins us now for more. Maurena Chloe, how are you doing? Maurena Merea, I just firstly wanted to acknowledge the devastating use this morning of coming out of Fungare and yeah, funer and community impacted and also, of course, all of those as well who have had their lives impacted by yet again another devastating climate change charge with the event. Yeah, it's a horrible, horrible news out of Fungare and we'll continue to follow that story. Let's focus on Auckland, though, Chloe. Obviously, you're the Auckland Central MP. What did you make of yesterday's response? There were obviously a lot of criticisms back in January about how things were handled. Did we learn anything? Yeah, thanks for that question. Look, talking to Auckland Emergency Management and a range of those who are in the bunker yesterday, it was clear that lessons had been learnt and speaking to, particularly the three local boards in my area of Auckland Central, particularly those on the Houdaki Islands, it was really clear that flows of communication were a lot better. However, I had had interactions with our firefighters on late Monday evening and it became really clear that they were in a bit of a stash with Fire Emergency New Zealand. I think it's really important for people to know the distinction here. When we're talking about fens or Fire Emergency New Zealand, we're talking about the infrastructure or kind of the bureaucracy that controls and looks after our firefighters and we're deployed in their resourcing and otherwise. Frontline firefighters, though, were the ones who are raising their alarm with me that they and anticipation of the weather events coming had asked for their heavy rescue to be staffed. That decision wasn't made until late on Tuesday morning and many of them raised extensive frustration with that. What do we talk about? What do we mean when we're talking about the heavy rescue climate? What difference would that have potentially made? Well, we're talking about equipment and machinery that is kind of tasked with and capable of doing those heavy rescues in response to floodwaters but also in response to land slips. So to give some more context here, we have a letter which I believe is already well public, public from about February. Where Auckland Emergency Management actually wrote to Fire Emergency New Zealand leadership in Tamaki Makoto, Auckland and asked them to have 24-7 staffing capability of the skills necessary on that heavy rescue for urban search and rescue given the thousands of land slips that had been triggered by Auckland anniversary flooding and then by cyclone Gabriel. We saw that that 24-7 staffing did not happen and what we saw and the kind of lines of communication that I'm getting from frontline firefighters is that that meant without that decision being made late on Monday evening or early on Tuesday morning, is that our firefighters were stuck in the same gridlock traffic that the rest of Auckland was in trying to get to that heavy rescue. How frustrated were they? You said you spoke to them. What were they telling you? They were just telling me the same thing that I think many New Zealanders saw in the industrial action that rolled across a year or so ago that they felt as though there was this kind of disconnect between the buzzer, the top of the official dim in the bureaucracy and those who were on the shop floor. And this is why I put these questions to Minister Kere Mignolty, obviously the Minister responsible for our emergency response in the chamber in Parliament yesterday, because I think that there are really important questions and scrutiny due to the fact that we have seen far more record investment going into fire emergency New Zealand, but for whatever reason it present that does not seem to be trickling down to satisfactory outcomes for those on the front lines. We're talking here about our equipment, but also about staffing levels and the level of recruitment and therefore also paying conditions. So how do we get that disconnect to be fixed then? How do we fix that? Well, something that's unique for Simon's, who's always, hey, is that sunlight is the best disinfectant. We've got to lift the lid on it. Fire emergency New Zealand in the form that it is currently is a relatively new beast. And I think as we've seen with many changes to our structures, for many of our health education and otherwise over the past few years, that we need to have continued and ongoing scrutiny to have those systems working as best as they possibly can. Do you think that scrutiny played a part in terms of how the Auckland emergency management system was running yesterday? Oh, yeah, definitely. I think that the fact that we had not only the response that we did in January and February and the frustrations from Aucklanders and it actually say from a number of New Zealanders across the country felt really profoundly, then obviously we had the independent report of Mike Bush with 17 recommendations. I think it's fair to say that many felt as though there would be Jewish scrutiny if things did not go properly this time around. So definitely things were a lot better, but all of that said, I don't think that we've made, given the timeframe, the necessary progress on all of those 17 recommendations. And scrutiny will continue to be applied as it should be. There was also a bit of a sense of panic as people literally fled the city yesterday and it led to absolute chaos on the roads. It took Chris Chang two and a half hours to get home but it's about seven Ks away from the central city yesterday, Chloe. Yeah, and Mette, look, I was on the show, you know, in early February just in the wake of the Auckland anniversary flooding in Saikon, Gabriel. And I said, something along the lines of, we're not just having a recovery conversation, but we should be having the kind of, don't look up conversation. This is the moment. We have now seen this climate change charged with it impacting our largest city in this country where a third of the population live. As it's also ravaged places in the South Island, up north on the East Coast, on the West Coast, these are the calls to action. Our parliament must act urgently to meet the scientific reality, to urgently bring down our emissions, but also to adapt our towns and cities. And it's not as though this is some great mystery. We know where our greenhouse gas emissions come from in the makeup of our economy. And that actually gives us clues to where we can have greater resilience, whether it's in our food production, but also in our transport and in our housing, where we're building and developing. Yeah, I remember climate minister James Shaw saying we're entering our period of consequences. So are we acting fast enough, Chloe? No, no, we're not, Mette. We're continuing to build a sprawling city, particularly in Tamaki, Mogoro. We are developing on some of our most fertile soils, which is just an absolute slap in the face of the idea that we would have that food resilience. We can be moving far faster when it comes to decarbonising our transport networks, but still we seem to be stuck. And particularly our parliament and our politics are really peculiar dichotomy, a false dichotomy, where there's this pretense that providing people with greater transport choice, for example, by investing in public transport and cycling and in walking, is somehow this war on cars. And I find it so flippant and so frustrating, as I think many New Zealanders, particularly young New Zealanders, who time and again have come out in their thousands, and their tens of thousands, to demand that their political leaders act now. We know the solutions. We've got to get on with it. Yeah, I think anyone that sat in the car yesterday trying to leave the city, Chloe, would have wished for a much better public transport system in Auckland. Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think that we saw with the frustrations around particularly the rail closures that we saw precisely the same thing. Not only are we dealing with the consequences of political leaders continuing to kick the can down the road for years and years and years on climate action, but also with decades of infrastructural under-investment in the likes of our public transport network. And that comes at the cost of resilience. Chloe Swabrick, Chloe Swabrick, Auckland Central MP, joining us live from Wellington. Thank you so much. Cheers. As we get outside, climate central, a nonprofit group that reports on climate change analyzed the data from the US Forest Service that can estimate the annual benefit of urban trees. Now in their report, they include that many California cities like San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose. Now let's take a look at some of that data for San Jose. We were able to avoid about 91 million gallons of storm runoff and that's roughly 137 Olympic-sized pools. Our trees in San Jose also helped improve the air we breathe by removing about 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide and other particulate matter. We can all protect and support urban forests continue to benefit from them and we are putting