Te Anau quake: Civil Defence website glitch 'gotta be fixed', Mitchell says

A problem with the Civil Defence website which saw it go down during Thursday night's tsunami emergency has been identified and a permanent fix will be put in place, Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell says.

Soon after the earthquake rocked the lower South Island, texts began arriving to RNZ asking why the Civil Defence website was down.

Southland's mayor said the council will also be looking into the issue.

A magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck 40 kilometres north of Te Anau at 9.14pm, sparking an order to evacuate coastal areas along the West Coast of the South Island, from Milford Sound to Puysegur Point.

The emergency was downgraded about half-an-hour later and the evacuation order was cancelled.

Mitchell told Checkpoint he would be meeting with NEMA officials early next week to follow-up and make sure he was satisfied that the fix had been made.

The reality was, there was a glitch with the website and "that's gotta be fixed", he said.

Mitchell refuted claims that a emergency alert text was not sent out.

Checkpoint's Lisa Owen read out texts from listeners who said they didn't get any alerts and were left in the dark about what was happening.

Mitchell said a text alert was sent out and the majority of people who needed it received it.

He said the individual cases would need to be looked into - and there would be an explanation as to why they didn't receive a text.

He said it was possible they were out of coverage or their phone was switched off.

Mitchell said New Zealand's emergency response was "world class" and other countries looked to it to help their own response.

Major issues with website, academic says

University of Auckland computer science lecturer Dr Ulrich Speidel said there were major issues with Civil Defence's website's usability, structure and resilience even when it was working as intended.

Trying to find basic information on the nearest evacuation centre involved clicking through multiple pages, Speidel said.

"For example, I tried this morning to find out where my local civil defence emergency shelter in Auckland was and it took me eight clicks from the civildefence.govt.nz website to get to that."

Existing technology, like geolocation, was also not being used to the country's advantage, he said.

"Almost every web advertiser is able to geolocate me to the region I'm in. Shouldn't the same be possible if I use my mobile phone to look up an emergency website, so I don't have to choose from umpteen options to find my region?

"There's a lot of thought that needs to go into designing a system like this, and I'm having the sneaking suspicion that that's not really happening everywhere.

"It's not a good look for the Civil Defence website to fall over."

Quite a shake down there'

Earlier on Friday, Southland mayor Rob Scott said it was good that people took the tsunami warning seriously.

"It's been quite a shake down there, but it's been quite pleasing to hear that that risk has been minimised and there's no need for an evacuation, although I was talking to people connected to people out at Milford Sound, because there are people staying out there. They did the right thing, they got to higher ground straight afterwards, so it was pleasant to hear that people did the right thing at the time".

However, he said it appeared the Civil Defence website buckled under pressure.

"I had heard that the site had gone down due to demand, which is something we'll have to look at."

He said the region had escaped relatively unscathed.

"I've heard so far that everyone is OK and there's been a little bit of damage to some of the properties in terms of cracking in houses and the like, but the important thing is that so far, I've heard that everyone is OK."

Scott said the earthquake was a reminder that an emergency can happen at any time.

The tsunami warning was also cancelled late last night.

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said there were no tsunami signals detected by Earth Sciences in the two hours after the event, showing there was no ongoing tsunami activity affecting the area and the threat had passed.

Website issues

An investigation into why the website crashed would be carried out. NEMA could not confirm when the site went down.

But a spokesperson said it was down for about 75 minutes and was back up before the evacuation warning was downgraded about midnight.

There was an issue with the firewall and once it was identified, the website was back up in minutes, they said.

The site underwent rigourous testing and had passed its most recent test in June with flying colours, they said.

There would be a full investigation into the response but there was no timeframe on when it would be finished.

Civil Defence Emergency Management director John Price told Morning Report the website was just one part of an emergency response.

"You cannot always rely on technology, it is one of the things we do use. The EMA [emergency mobile alert] is one tool, radio is another tool and we ask people to use their own human danger sense."

An emergency mobile alert was issued to around 30 to 40 people living near Milford Sound within ten minutes of the earthquake, Price said.

Preparedness and planning were shared responsibilities, he said.

"These are all responsibilities we all need to have. We talk about the system being prepared - the system is 5.3 million people in New Zealand, of which NEMA is one of those."

Media enquiries to the Police Media Centre also went unanswered on Thursday night.

A spokesperson said the centre closes at 9pm and, while there was an on-call staff member overnight, police action was not required in response to the earthquake.

RNZ revealed today the agency's new national emergency alert map did not display the evacuation alert during flooding in Wairoa last week.

A NEMA spokesperson said residents did receive an emergency mobile alert on their phones during the Wairoa evacuation, even though that alert was not displayed on the map.

The map was live but was still being tested and improved, the spokesperson said.